The international Earth Rotation and Reference System Service expects that Tuesday will be just 1.34 milliseconds shorter than the standard 24 hours.
"We've known about the rotation of the Earth being variable for about a hundred years," said the former Director of Time at the United States Naval Observatory Dennis McCarthy. "This is just one of those little variations that comes along."
The speed of the Earth's rotation isn't fixed. A 2023 study showed a day was approximately 19 hours in Earth's early history.
July 5, 2024, was the shortest day ever, 1.65 milliseconds shorter than the usual 86,400 seconds, said MIT geophysicist Thomas Herring.
Scientists predicted that Aug. 5 could be the next day we will see a quicker rotation, 1.25 milliseconds shorter than usual.
"The cause of this acceleration is not explained," a leading authority on Earth's rotation at Moscow State University, Leonid Zotov, said. "Most scientists believe that it is something inside the Earth. Ocean and atmospheric models don't explain this huge acceleration."
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