June 29, 2022, was the shortest day ever on record, at 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours. You probably didn't notice, since 1.59 milliseconds goes by pretty fast, but it raises some interesting theoretical questions, like: Since it fell on a Wednesday, should you subtract those missing 1.59 milliseconds from your workday or from your sleep' And: Could Earth's days get even shorter' That may sound like a wild idea, but there's a reason to think it could happen: climate change. Burning fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which melts glaciers'and how that affects the Earth's motion might have some bearing on the length of a day. I'll take you through it step by step. First, let's go over some basics about how we determine what a 'day' is. We'll start with the sun. For the sake of this calculation, we can assume that the sun just stays in place. Of course, this isn't actually true'in fact, the sun orbits the center of the galaxy. But this motion has no measurable...
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