1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Is the Earth rotating faster?
A person would not notice it but we can measure length of day variation. We can point at processes and say "that will alter the length of day due to xyz mechanism" and we can measure the length of day variation. However, the measured length of day variation is the combination of all relevant processes. So it would be very difficult to quantify how much each process contributes in an accurate way. Even if you know exactly how much ice has melted it is difficult to know where it has been distributed. One could use the hydrostatic approximation but then you have to include to bathymetry and potentially other effects such as salinity and temperature. I imagine the error bars would be much larger than the measured change!
Comment by bluesbrother21 at 05/08/2022 at 19:17 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
For mountain glaciers it might be difficult, but we're actually *extremely* good at tracking the movement of mass across the Earth. Missions like GRACE[1] that measure the Earth's gravity at very high levels of precision are used to track the evolution of mass distributions. In practice these changes tend to be related to ocean patterns and ice melts.