OT: Earth's orbit changing?

[Kamog]

According to this article: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science....ap/index.html

Since 1972, they have been adding a 'leap second' at the end of each year because the earth's movement through space is slowing down. But for some reason, in the most recent five years, the earth is no longer slowing down and they didn't have to add the leap second. They don't know why.

It seems to me that one second per year is a really big change, and it will really add up over millions of years? If the earth keeps slowing down like that, wouldn't the orbit decay and the earth spiral into the sun?

[Edit: mark topic as OT]

[ January 01, 2004, 17:49: Message edited by: Kamog ]

[PvK]

It might vascillate, rather than steadily changing in one direction. The interior isn't solid, and we don't really know exactly what is going on down there. Lava-hampsters playing with their magnetic gyroscopes, maybe...



PvK

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Lava-hampsters playing with their magnetic gyroscopes, maybe...

there a little obsessive about those things, to.

[Baron Munchausen]

Hmm, there are only 31,536,000 seconds in a year. At a loss rate of one second per year we'd be falling into the sun in very short order on a geologic time scale. Obviously this cannot have been going on for long if the earth has been here for billions of years. There must be something funky going on that we don't understand. Maybe the sun's magnetic field is strong enough to slow us down at times? Or some sort of time-space warping is going on to make it look like the earth's orbital period is changing when it is not. It would be funny if they discovered there was some calibration error in their instruments....

[Cipher7071]

Hmmm...something on the order of a second per year might be caused by our solar system passing through a denser part of space....say like some thicker hydrogen clouds. Whether that extra amount of friction would make a difference of a second a year is anybody's guess.

They do say that there are signs that the poles of Earth's magnetic field are getting ready to flip again, and that just before that happens there will be a temporary decrease in the strength of our magnetic field. Again, it's hard to say what the result of that will be on the length of a year, but that will definitely be a bad century for laying in the sun.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

excuse my ignorance, but could we magnetically shield shelter's while that happens?