Many of us were perhaps too busy celebrating on New Year's Eve to notice the countdown lasting one full second longer than normal. In addition to our calendar picking up the odd spare day in a leap year, it seems that every couple of years we need to pick up a leap second and this is the year!
The thing is: it's all Bay of Fundy's fault. The current time interval that we call a second was developed about a hundred years ago but since then the earth's rotation has slowed ever so slightly. This slow down is due to the moon's effects on the earth's tides; most specifically the 'friction' caused by the Bay of Fundy's tides.
Check out this interesting article, in which a professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics explains Fundy's culpability in this phenomenon.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Bay of Fundy & the leap second connection
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3 comments:
The Bay of Fundy deserves its credit, but it's not the only effect. The crust of the earth is currently spinning faster than it was 100 years ago. See this plot. The highest point on it, about 100 years ago, was the slowest the earth has ever rotated. Lately we've been rotating faster.
phew....that's interesting. I was also wondering "why now"- considering the tides have been in the bay for more than 1000 years....
We visited the Bay of Fundy in 2003. It was one of our most beautiful trips. We thought we heard that the tides of the Bay of Fundy originated in the Indian ocean. Is there some truth to this?
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