

UTC vs UT1 and Leap Seconds - wyclif
http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/utc-vs-ut1-leap-seconds.html

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ne0codex
Neat article, then I read the last sentence. That was a very large leap from
Earth cycle to blaming global warming...

Isn't this happening because of the moon being farther away from the Earth?

source: <http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=124>

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joezydeco
Earthquakes.

Fukushima 2011 shortened the day by 1.8 microseconds. Sumatra 2004 took away
6.8 microseconds.

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ars
He worked too hard. Wikipedia already has this graph:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leapsecond.ut1-utc.svg>

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crazygringo
Great graph. I had no idea the rotation speed of the Earth varied like that.

The music of the spheres isn't quite as perfectly in-tune as I had thought!

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zanny
I await the day that time is not based off the spinning of a ball of rock in
some quadrant of the Milky Way.

Also, screw time zones and daylight savings.

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Hinrik
>I await the day

I see what you did there.

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scottw
Wouldn't less ice at the poles (= more water at the equator = higher
rotational inertia) mean a slower rotation? Maybe we can get that second back.

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bazzargh
Replacing water with ice at the poles would mean _more_ mass at the poles, not
less, since ice is displacing water and is less dense. So he may have a
plausible argument that it's the other way round, but I haven't done the
calculations.

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zhoutong
It doesn't work like that. The mass of water displaced is equal to the mass of
the floating ice itself. Melting a piece of ice has no change on water level.

so yeah, nothing changes.

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FreeFull
Both the southern polar cap and the Greenland ice mass rest on ground rather
than float in the ocean, which means any melting will cause the ocean levels
to rise.

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zhoutong
I was talking about the displacement only (which the parent thread discusses).
I of course acknowledge the common sense that not all ice is floating on
water.

