How Rising Sea Levels May Affect The length Of Your Day

Authors

  • Elias Vitali Honours Integrated Science, McMaster University
  • Sonya Martin Honours Integrated Science, McMaster University

Keywords:

Physics, Mechanics, Climate Change

Abstract

The Earth has a near-constant rotational period of approximately 23.934 hours. Rising global temperatures put this period in danger of changing by redistributing polar ice cap mass towards the equator through conservation of angular momentum. The Earth was modeled as a solid sphere with the assumption that melted ice would form a spherical shell over the Earth’s surface. We explicitly show that if all ice were to melt, Earth’s rotational period would be increased by approximately 0.285 seconds, where the discrepancy with our clocks accumulates to 17.35 minutes after only 10 years.

References

Barnett, J.E. (1999) Time’s Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, the Fascinating History of Timekeeping and how Our Discoveries Changed the World. 1st ed. Harcourt Brace/Harvest Book.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2017). Planets and Pluto: Physical Characteristics. [online] Available at: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?planet_phys_par [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Taylor, J. (2005). Classical mechanics. 1st ed. Sausalito, Calif.: University Science Books.

Poore, R.Z., Williams, R.S. & Tracey, C. (2011) Sea level and climate: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 002–00. [online] Available at: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/ [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Petrucci, R., Cunningham, C. & Moore, T. (1977). General chemistry. 1st ed. New York London: Macmillan Collier Macmillan.

Wikipedia (2017) DUT1. [online]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUT1 [Accessed 7 April 2017].

Downloads

How to Cite

Vitali, E., & Martin, S. (2017). How Rising Sea Levels May Affect The length Of Your Day. Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics, 6. Retrieved from https://journals.le.ac.uk/index.php/jist/article/view/735

Issue

Section

Articles