lengthening days

Mathew Englander "mathew " at ican.net
Fri Mar 27 08:51:08 UTC 1998


On my local TV news tonight, they said that NASA thinks El Niño has
slowed dow the Earth's rotation, making days 1/10 of a second longer.
Surely this can't be right -- if it is, why don't we have three leap
seconds a month?

At CNN Interactive there is a news story
(http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9803/26/nasa.el.nino/index.html)
quoting the time of rotatin as being "a fraction of a second" longer.
But in a transcript of a CNN program
(http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/9803/26/ee.07.html) where a NASA
oceanographer is interviewed, the interviewer for some reason puts the
fraction at 2/3 of a second. What gives?

Mathew Englander




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