2022-05-23

科学家们发现，目前地球的自转速度比过去50年来的任何时候都要快。专家们认为，2021年将会是几十年来最短的一年。不过，我们是不是应该在这一年结束前争分夺秒，抓紧时间？

'Time waits for no man' – or so the saying goes. We can't stop time and we can't control it, although sometimes, in our minds, we think time flies – for example, when the weekend arrives, we feel it's over in no time! But if this year in particular feels like it's passing more quickly than others have done, there could be a scientific explanation why.

Of course, we know a year is usually 365 days long. Clever scientists calculated this a long time ago. They also worked out that every four years, we need an extra day to keep our calendar in sync – this is called a leap year. But 2021 isn't one of those years, and yet it's not behaving like a normal year. Scientists and astrophysicists have done the math and discovered the Earth is moving faster than it ever has in the last 50 years. This means that 2021 is going to be the shortest year in decades.

Apparently1, this is because the Earth is spinning