How Rising Sea Levels May Affect The length Of Your Day
Keywords:
Physics, Mechanics, Climate ChangeAbstract
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.
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