You may already feel as if there’s not enough time in the day.
But it’s not just your imagination – the days have been getting shorter.
According to scientists, July 9, July 22 and August 5 this year were between 1.3 and 1.51 milliseconds shorter than the standard 24-hour day.
Although the exact reason is still a mystery, there could be several causes, such as changes in the atmosphere, the melting of glaciers, motion in the Earth’s core, and a weakening magnetic field.
While the loss of a few milliseconds is not a cause for too much concern, a frightening new book imagines a world literally ‘spinning out of control’.
In ‘Circular Motion’ by Alex Foster, days on Earth last 23 hours, then 20 hours, and then eventually two hours.
Like a supercharged spinning top, the planet spins so fast that even gravity loses its grip, as the sun rises and sets ever faster.
Now, experts reveal the real implications of such a terrifying scenario, from large-scale disasters, floods and earthquakes.
A new novel called ‘Circular Motion’ by Alex Foster imagines a world literally spinning out of control, until a day last just two hours
In Foster’s new novel, Earth’s rotation speeds up due to a network of massive aircraft that orbit the Earth at 30,000 feet, revolutionising global transportation.
The acceleration of Earth’s spin begins gradually, and days are just a few seconds shorter than normal, so nobody initially notices.
However, Earth’s spin progressively gets faster and faster until a day lasts just two hours – triggering a global catastrophe.
If Earth’s spin really did get faster, experts say it cause a ‘centrifugal effect’ where the things start to swing away from the planet’s axis, much like the hanging chairs on a spinning carousel ride.
Earth’s oceans would start to bulge around the equator, giving the planet more of a diamond shape, with sloping northern and southern hemispheres.
Water pulled from the polar regions (where centrifugal force is low) would cause the Arctic Ocean to become shallower and send the equatorial region underwater.
Even land around the equator that’s not underwater could have a greatly increased chance of tsunamis and flooding.
Duncan Agnew, professor of geophysics at the University of California San Diego, said the ‘largest changes would be in the ocean tides’.
This long-exposure photo of the northern night sky above the Nepali Himalayas shows the apparent paths of the stars as Earth rotates. If Earth spun fast enough, is this what we would see?
According to scientists, July 9, July 22 and August 5 this year were between 1.3 and 1.51 milliseconds shorter than the standard 24-hour day . Although the exact reason is still a mystery, there could be several causes, such as changes in the atmosphere, the melting of glaciers, motion in the Earth’s core, and a weakening magnetic field (stock image)
As any beach-goer knows, in coastal areas around the world there are high tides and low tides, which are due to the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun, combined with the rotation of Earth.
The daily rotation of the Earth produces two high tides and two low tides every 24 hours and 50 minutes.
‘Change that by 10 per cent and the tides in some places would get larger and in others smaller,’ Professor Agnew told the Daily Mail.
Also, the faster the Earth’s spin, the faster tectonic plates would move, would could add to more geological stress and ‘a lot of earthquakes’, the academic added.
It’s worth remembering that the equator (where Earth’s circumference is the widest) spins faster than elsewhere, such as the tropics or the poles.
The equator spins at about 1,025 miles (1,650km) per hour, while the poles spin barely above zero miles per hour.
As Earth spins and we go around with it, we are held into place by gravity, but if the Earth spun fast enough, centrifugal force would overcome gravity, causing objects to be flung into space.
‘The faster Earth turns, the more gravity will be canceled out and the lighter you’ll feel,’ said Foster in a piece for New Scientist.
Hurricanes will spin faster and carry more energy if the world’s spin greatly increases, researchers claim. In this picture from space, a swirling hurricane forms
The faster Earth’s spin, the faster tectonic plates would move, would could add to more geological stress and ‘a lot of earthquakes’. Pictured, damage from Afghanistan earthquake, September 4, 2025
NASA astronomer Dr Sten Odenwald also warned that weather phenomena would become more extreme, capable of causing more damage.
As the planet spins faster, an apparent force known as the Coriolis effect, which gives hurricanes their spin, intensifies.
‘Hurricanes will spin faster and carry more energy,’ Dr Odenwald said.
If Earth’s spin increased, there would of course also be both less sunlight in the day and less time to sleep at night, which might make humans less productive.
People would have keep putting their clocks back as the days shortened, or come up with a whole new time-keeping system.
Humans have a ‘circadian rhythm’ – an internal clock that is closely attuned to the 24-hour day – which can cause physical and mental issues if disrupted (by factors like plane travel).
Additionally, many satellites would no longer be positioned correctly, which could disrupt satellite communications, internet, TV broadcasting and more.
Luckily, Professor Agnew said the idea of Earth’s rotation speeding up to the extent portrayed in the new novel is a ‘particularly absurd premise’.
Each day on Earth contains 86,400 seconds, but the rotation isn’t uniform, which means over the course of a year, each day has a fraction of a second more or less
‘This cannot happen and nothing like it has ever been observed for any planet or star,’ Professor Agnew told the Daily Mail.
In actual fact, the Earth has been rotating more and more slowly over the long-term, but this change has been very gradual.
‘A billion years ago the day was maybe 19 hours long,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘If you went back to when there were dinosaurs and didn’t have a clock you wouldn’t probably notice that the day was 30 minutes shorter.’
Dr Judah Levine, Fellow of the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland, also questioned how close the book’s premise is to ‘real physics’.
‘If the story is loosely connected to reality, then the speed-up of Earth had to be accompanied by something else losing angular momentum, maybe the orbit of the moon,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘This is a fundamental principle.’
Maybe the orbit of the moon losing angular momentum could cause the speed-up of Earth, he added.
‘If that is what happens, the moon gets a lot closer, and the tidal effects become much stronger and more frequent because the periods are driven by the length of the day.’