This is welcome news if you’re having a bad day: A bunch of websites are reporting that today could be the SHORTEST DAY IN HISTORY.
The rotation of the Earth speeds up and slows down depending on a few things. The biggest factor is how far away the Moon is.
The good news, if you’re having a rough one, is today will be 1.3 MILLISECONDS shorter than normal. That’s just over ONE ONE-THOUSANDTH of a second you won’t have to experience.
The bad news is you won’t notice, and it’s NOT actually a record. (???) DailyMail.com went full click-bait with their headline, calling it the “shortest day in history.” But according to calculations, it won’t even be the shortest day of 2025.
July 22nd will be 1.38 milliseconds shorter than normal. And August 5th will be the shortest day of the year at 1.5 milliseconds shy of a full 24 hours.
There’s an outside chance the Earth spins slightly faster than expected today. But the shortest day ever recorded was LAST year. July 5th, 2024 was 1.66 milliseconds shorter than normal. (It was a good day for it. Everyone was nursing a Fourth of July hangover.)
(Nerd Alert: 1.66 is just the record since we started tracking this stuff with atomic clocks in the 1970s. Billions of years ago, experts think the average day was only 19 hours long because the Moon was closer.)
