Researchers from the United States have published an article in the journal Nature on how climatic processes affect the angular velocity of the Earth, which determines the duration of the day and the astronomical year.
The melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic seem to affect the rotation of the planet, slowing it down, aif.ru reports.
The melting of the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica led to a decrease in the mass of the planet's poles, and the level of the world's oceans rose, which affected the speed of rotation of the Earth.
"Enough ice has melted to shift the sea level so much that we can actually see the effect of this on the Earth's rotation speed," says the study's author, a geophysicist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (USA) Duncan Agnew.
For his part, Leonid Zotov, professor at the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, Doctor of Physico-Mathematical Sciences, believes that although the calculations explaining the acceleration or deceleration of the Earth's rotation include melting glaciers, they do not play a significant role in this.
According to the scientist, this is based on some other phenomena - either occurring in the bowels of the Earth, or connected to an influence from the Moon.
Alex Shishlo for Rough&Polished
