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Climate Change Lengthens Days, Impacting GPS Navigation

3/13/2026

Summary

Story summary

Researchers from the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich developed a deep learning model that reconstructs Earth's rotational history.
The study reveals that climate change is lengthening days by approximately 1.5 milliseconds per century due to rising sea levels from melting polar ice sheets.
Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, the findings indicate that this rate of day length increase is unprecedented in the last 3.6 million years.
The results underscore the significant impact of human-induced climate change on Earth's rotation, potentially affecting GPS and satellite navigation systems.

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Story summary

Researchers from the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich developed a deep learning model that reconstructs Earth's rotational history.
The study reveals that climate change is lengthening days by approximately 1.5 milliseconds per century due to rising sea levels from melting polar ice sheets.
Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, the findings indicate that this rate of day length increase is unprecedented in the last 3.6 million years.
The results underscore the significant impact of human-induced climate change on Earth's rotation, potentially affecting GPS and satellite navigation systems.