The Earth Just Started Spinning Faster Than Ever Before And Scientists Don’t Know Why

The Earth recently completed a rotation faster than ever before at 1.59 millisecond under 24 hours, and the consequences for how we keep time have experts around the world alarmed.

It could be the first time in world history that global clocks will have to be sped up.

“This would be required to keep civil time—which is based on the super-steady beat of atomic clocks—in step with solar time, which is based on the movement of the Sun across the sky,” Time and Date reported.

Scientists don’t know what is causing our planet to spin faster than ever before, but some experts fear it could be “devastating,” while others speculate the shorter days could be related to climate change, of course.

Since the Earth’s rotation has always largely been slowing down throughout time, atomic clocks have thus far only added positive leap seconds to keep up. 27 leap seconds have been needed to keep atomic time accurate since the 1970s.