[LEAPSECS] Earth speeding up?

[Tom Van Baak]

> I'm not a geophysicist, but I too have noted what Tom reports.  I've attached

> a plot that by coincidence I just made last week.

>

> The best hand-waiving arguments I've heard for these recent "decadal fluctuations"

> is that the oblateness of the Earth is changing, possibly due to the ice caps changing.

> Short-term fluctuations are much better understood, and they correlate very strongly

> with the atmospheric angular momentum.

>

> Demetrios,


Thanks for sharing that one. Now, do you dare join the club and predict the year when we hit 86400.000?

For a longer-term view, attached are two plots from a 2010 paper "Long-Periodical Variations of Earth Rotation, Determined from Reconstructed Millennial-Scale Glacial Sea Level" by Chapanov & Gambis translating mean sea level to excess LOD.

See also the 2003 Nature paper "Sea-level fluctuations during the last glacial cycle" by Siddall & Rohling.

One of these papers is from "New challenges for reference systems and numerical standards in astronomy"
http://syrte.obspm.fr/jsr/journees2010/pdf/

Or I can email you copies. I have the raw data here somewhere too.

/tvb
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