Earth days are getting longer. It has not happened in 3.6 million years
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Earth days are getting longer. It has not happened in 3.6 million years")
Earth is spinning slowly, lengthening our days. Photograph: (Unsplash)
Days on Earth are becoming longer, not because of the moon or other forces humans can't control, but because of how hot our planet has become. Climate change is responsible for slowing the spin of our planet so much that something like this has not been seen in millions of years.
Days on Earth are getting longer. While you might think that cosmic forces are responsible for this change, in reality, humans are to blame in this case. Scientists have pointed out that our planet's spin has slowed down, making days slightly longer. Typically, the gravitational pull of the Moon and forces inside Earth itself and in the atmosphere can create conditions for a faster spin. In July and August 2025, this is what happened, and we had around 1.25 milliseconds chopped off our days. This happened because of a change in the Moon's proximity to Earth. However, now humans are doing something so drastic to the planet that our rotation is slowing down. And since this problem has become a major challenge, our planet's spin might keep reducing. Our planet is warming at an unprecedented rate, causing glaciers and even permafrost to melt. The sea level is rising, and this is directly affecting the rate at which the Earth spins.
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Earth's history over millions of years
This melting water spreads across the globe, redistributing Earth's mass. This change is tugging on Earth and slowing down its spin, thus adding milliseconds to our days. Scientists from the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich tried to understand whether this change is as dramatic as it sounds, or whether Earth has witnessed similar occurrences in its past. They checked Earth's history since the Late Pliocene to look for instances when the length of a day changed at such a rapid pace. Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, study author from the University of Vienna’s Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, said in a statement, "In our earlier work, we showed that the accelerated melting of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers in the 21st century is raising sea levels, which slows Earth's rotation and therefore lengthens the day. What remained unclear was whether there were earlier periods when climate increased day length at a similarly rapid pace."
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A change in Earth's spin not seen in 3.6 million years
They found that days on Earth are increasing by about 1.33 milliseconds every 100 years. The more shocking revelation was that this had not happened in the past 3.6 million years. Since Earth continues to warm, the spin is only going to slow down. "This rapid increase in day length implies that the rate of modern climate change has been unprecedented at least since the late Pliocene, 3.6 million years ago," Benedikt Soja, Professor of Space Geodesy at ETH Zurich, said, adding, "This can be attributed primarily to human influences." While the change is too small to feel for humans, it would affect GPS satellites, space navigation, and complex financial networks.
