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Earth s 28 fastest days ever recorded happened in 2020.
On average, the planet rotated more quickly around its axis last year than it did in previous years.
Scientists who measure the speed of Earth s rotation think 2021 may be even faster than 2020. If so, they may need to subtract a second from the year.
As it turns out, 2020 was shorter than previous years – even though it didn t always feel that way.
The 28 fastest days on record since 1960 all happened last year, since Earth revolved around its axis up to 1.5 milliseconds faster than usual. Those 28 days all broke the previous record for the shortest day ever documented: July 5, 2005. That day lasted 1.0516 milliseconds less than the standard 86,400 seconds. Now, the shortest day ever recorded lasted .45 milliseconds less than that previous record.
But in 1962 she left Hollywood behind and became a nun.
Her story was also the subject of an Oscar-nominated short film on HBO, titled God Is the Bigger Elvis, released in 2012. Today, Hart receives hundreds of letters from people across the country seeking guidance on having a closer relationship with God.
As you age,
When I finally get on the phone with Sanjay Gupta, M.D., in March, after he has rescheduled three times because he’s prepping for CNN’s first COVID-19 town hall, he’s relieved to be talking about something positive: brain science. “We’re seeing evidence that lifestyle changes can significantly improve brain health and even reverse brain disease,” he says. “That may not sound that significant, except that we really never thought of the brain that way until recently. We thought of the heart that way, and some other organs, but the brain was always this black box.”
Earth as seen from space. (Image: NASA/Reid Wiseman)
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The year 2020 will be remembered for many things, most of them unpleasant, but it will also be remembered for being one of the fastest on record, due to our planet’s accelerating rate of spin. Should this trend continue, it could result in an unprecedented “negative leap second.”
Earth Was Spinning Faster Last Year Than at Any Other Time in The Past 50 Years
STEPHANIE PAPPAS, LIVE SCIENCE
Even time did not escape 2020 unscathed.
The 28 fastest days on record (since 1960) all occurred in 2020, with Earth completing its revolutions around its axis milliseconds quicker than average.
That s not particularly alarming – the planet s rotation varies slightly all the time, driven by variations in atmospheric pressure, winds, ocean currents and the movement of the core.
But it is inconvenient for international timekeepers, who use ultra-accurate atomic clocks to meter out the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by which everyone sets their clocks. When astronomical time, set by the time it takes the Earth to make one full rotation, deviates from UTC by more than 0.4 seconds, UTC gets an adjustment.