patho-cronismos haiku

ice caps disappear
the earth’s rotation slows down
we are losing time

What I’m Reading:

Climate change is starting to alter how humans keep time.

An analysis published in Nature on 27 March has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s unstable speed of rotation — will be delayed by three years.

— Elizabeth Gibney / “Climate change is starting to alter how humans keep time” / Nature