Something Deep Inside Earth Keeps Messing With the Length of Our Days
For practical purposes, we say that one day—the time it takes for Earth to rotate once on its axis—equates to 24 hours. In reality, different factors across different timescales influence how quickly our planet turns, which scientists have yet to fully understand. But new findings, published today in Nature, may finally solve at least one of these outstanding mysteries, namely how Earth’s rotation changes every couple of decades.
- ▪For practical purposes, we say that one day—the time it takes for Earth to rotate once on its axis—equates to 24 hours.
- ▪In reality, different factors across different timescales influence how quickly our planet turns, which scientists have yet to fully understand.
- ▪But new findings, published today in Nature, may finally solve at least one of these outstanding mysteries, namely how Earth’s rotation changes every couple of decades.
Gizmodo files mainly under tech. We currently carry 1,264 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/something-deep-inside-earth-keeps-messing-with-the-length-of-our-days-2000816070 |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:50:46 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T15:54:30.773Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T15:54:30.773Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Ic2mcIrkRI-S · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
For practical purposes, we say that one day—the time it takes for Earth to rotate once on its axis—equates to 24 hours. In reality, different factors across different timescales influence how quickly our planet turns, which scientists have yet to fully understand. But new findings, published today in Nature, may finally solve at least one of these outstanding mysteries, namely how Earth’s rotation changes every couple of decades. According to the study, the multidecadal changes in Earth’s behavior come from deep inside our planet. Three mechanisms—gravitational, electromagnetic, and topographic coupling—essentially compete with one another to speed up or slow down Earth’s rotation over several decades.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Gizmodo
