From crop failures and human displacement to melting glaciers and habitat loss, some of the discernible effects of climate change are well-known. But not all the alterations made by this crisis are quite so obvious — its impact on languages, for instance, is seldom noticed but has been documented by linguists. Researchers have now spotted another seemingly imperceptible change: climate change is transforming how humans tell time. For most of history, time was measured by the rotation of the Earth, which is an unreliable clock owing to its variable speed. This changed in 1967 with the adoption of atomic clocks, which are more accurate. But the Earth clock and the atomic clock are, at times, out of sync. To address this, a ‘leap second’ or an extra second is periodically added to the Coordinated Universal Time. Since 1972, 27 leap seconds have been added. However, climate change has sped up the Earth, synchronising it with atomic time and necessitating a ‘negative leap second’ — a second deducted from atomic time around the year, 2026. But climate change, like time, is a fickle entity. Scientists have recently discovered that melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica has slowed down the Earth’s rotation, once again, delaying the need for a ‘negative leap second’ till 2029.
All this may sound like dense, scientific nitpicking, but even a single misplaced second could throw off computer systems worldwide and lead to outages that affect sectors ranging from banking and stock markets to social media. Various entities tackle this problem in different ways — some ‘smear’ the extra second over a longer period while others, like Meta, propose doing away with the concept altogether, claiming that the Earth is now up to speed with atomic time. A single solution is unlikely given that the evolving vagaries of climate change keep altering the planet and its systems. But this — the problem, not the solution — leads to an important inference. Humankind’s depredations on nature are now being paid back with a nature-induced armageddon that is meddling with the fundamental tenets of civilisation: language, time, history and so on. Given the abstract nature of many of these transformations — the erosion of geological historical evidence owing to climate calamities, for instance — they remain less visible unlike, say, the deepening water crisis or rising temperatures. This makes record-keeping of certain kinds of loss even more challenging. The discourse on climate change and its impacts must be broadened to chronicle its intangible footprints.