Do the milliseconds seem longer to you?

Now you can blame global slowing. According to the National Geographic, Earth-time is lengthening due to phenomena deep inside the planet:

Tiny shifts that make our days milliseconds longer may be due to forces under our feet, a new study has found.

It has long been known that natural phenomena on Earth's surface, such as tides and winds, affect its rotation speed.

Now scientists are investigating how events in a mineral layer at the core-mantle boundary, 1,615 miles (2,600 kilometers) deep, similarly affect the planet's spin.

"The length of a day … is changing due to the interaction between the mantle and the core in the very deep Earth," said study co-author Kei Hirose, a geoscientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

"This is basically because the bottom of the mantle has very high electrical conductivity."

Raymond Jeanloz,University of California, Berkeley, explains:

"What this means is that the magnetic field in the core can grab onto, or lock into, the lowermost mantle," he said.

"And so one of the influences that this can have is in altering the length of day, or the rotation rate of the Earth, depending on when and where the core is grabbing onto the mantle."

Comments

[CraigC]

depending on when and where the core is grabbing onto the mantle."

I smell a harassment suit.

[Jake]

The magnetic field must be hella strong today cause looking at the clock it's only 11:30 while it feels like about 5:30... Probably just my company programming the clocks to run slow to squeeze out a few hours of free labor.