Your audio article is ready to load.
The Earth's spin is getting faster.
June 29 was the fastest day in recorded history, lasting 1.59 milliseconds less than the average 24 hours we know and love.
The days have become shorter since the Earth began to spin faster back in 2016 according to a recent study.
According to the study's authors, the impact of the rotation change has been enough to get the scientific community talking.
If the trend continues, mankind will likely have to make some changes to atomic time or the universal way that time on Earth is measured.
That is not easy when the tech industry does not want that to happen. Did you ever hear of the Y2K bug?
Earth has never been in a position to keep perfect time. The Earth's spin can be affected by a number of factors. The Guardian states that our planet has spun a bit slower in recent centuries than it has in the past.
The co-authors of the study told CBS that they think changes in ocean tides are to blame for the rotation change.
In order to address the issue of time being wrong, scientists have advocated for the introduction of negative leap seconds instead of adding an hour like we do during leap years.
This could be a separate set of issues. The tech industry doesn't like the idea of negative leap seconds.
Meta engineers said that negative leap second handling is supported for a long time. It has never been verified on a large scale and will lead to unpredictable and devastating outages across the world.
We might not all be happy with what the solution turns out to be if last week's anomalies persist.
The planet had its shortest day ever.
We might need to skip a second because the Earth is spinning too fast.