If it feels like you’re losing time in the day, you may be right. Scientists claim that on June 29, 2022, the Earth spun faster than normal, making it the shortest day recorded since the 1960s.
The average day is 24 hours long (or exactly 86,400 seconds). According to CBS, who spoke to Leonid Zotov, a scientist at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute of Lomonosov Moscow State University, June 29 was 1.59 millisecond shorter. Read more: Women don’t live longer than men after all?
Study challenges life expectancy misconceptions Zotov and a team of scientists recently published a study outlining possible hypotheses for Earth’s new accelerated rotation.
They reported that the Earth has been turning faster since 2016. According to the Guardian, 2020 had 28 of the shortest days recorded in the last 50 years. (Not every day, however, is shorter than 24 hours.) The increased rotational speed came as a surprise to scientists who, as Zotov and his peers wrote in the study, previously believed the Earth had been decelerating over the past centuries.