OK… It’s more than just high water.
Some people are just too smart for their own good. There's a group of people out there. (Very smart people.) that are convinced that the rotation of the Earth is slowing down. This is unusual. People that have been keeping track of stuff like this have been noticing that the Earth's rotation actually changes from time to time, but in general has been speeding up for the last several decades. To the turn of about one second a year. (they call this a leap second)
Now many of these people believe. that the opposite is occurring, and the Earth's rotation is slowing down to the tune of about one second per year.
According to cnn.com,
“A negative leap second has never been added or tested, so the problems it could create are without precedent,” Patrizia Tavella, a member of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, wrote in an article accompanying the study.”
The interesting part of this is that with the polar ice caps melting, (yes, they are) it's delaying the first negative leap second. By at least two to three years.
Now, I certainly don't know all the ramifications of this information. But. It will be impacting things like the stock market and computing. Most computer software is designed in such a way that adding a second every year is not a huge problem. But software that can subtract 1 second every year is not so common.
According to cnn.com,
“Nobody really anticipated that the Earth would speed up to the point where we might have to remove a leap second,” Agnew said.
Scambos, the University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist, said the “big deal” of the study is that it shows “changes from the Earth’s core are now trending bigger than the trends in loss of ice from the poles — even though ice loss has picked up in the last decade.”
There's a whole lot more detail that you might find interesting on the dynamics of the Earth's rotation and how it affects time as we measure it here on earth. If you're interested in more of the details, please check out the article through the link below.
Polar ice is melting and changing Earth’s rotation. It’s messing with time itself | CNN
Long-lost Greenland ice core suggests potential for disastrous sea level rise | CNN
Rock Stars Celebrating Birthdays in April
Gallery Credit: Chad Childers, Loudwire