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Warmer waters could spin the Earth faster
According to Felix Landerer of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and his colleagues,
the warming of the world's oceans is going to shorten the day. Due to the warming and expansion of ocean, water creeps up the shorelines thereby transferring the mass away from the central ocean and towards the shore. This tends to move water's mass away from the equator and towards the poles due to two factors. First, The expansion and movement of water is strongest in the depths of the North Atlantic due to a current there that carries water down from the surface. Second, a quirk of our planet's geography means that the continental shelf's surface area happens to be larger at high latitudes than around the equator. Accumulation of more mass at the poles will make the planet spin faster. If the ocean gets warmed at different depths and places, water may spill over. Whether and how this will affect the length of the day is less certain because how the oceans' depths respond to warming is not known. Several other factors like the moon's gravitational pull, interactions between Earth's liquid core and its solid mantle layer etc. also affect the length of an Earth day. Landerer's team are now trying to work out the other effects of redistributing the ocean.
Published: April 10, 2007
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