Every child knows instinctively what science has only recently confirmed: the days are longer when the weather is miserable. Those sunny, beautiful days fly by way too fast. The rainy days, when there is nothing to do but sit and stare out the window, and wait for the rain to go away so we can play outside.
Editor’s Note: If you were born after 1980, or so, it may help you to understand that there used to be a time when children amused themselves by playing outdoors. This was prior to the invention of self-esteem and long before television-on-demand, handheld video games, and mobile phones. For more information, consult your parents, grandparents, or other students of ancient history.
Those who have experienced this phenomenon may have written it off as a figment of your imagination. Don’t be so sure. Even Albert Einstein recognized the intertwinement of science in such situations. He famously explained relativity, saying,
“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” Robert Louis Stevenson captured this sentiment from a child’s perspective, trying to make sense of his bedtime in the classic poem “Bed in Summer” (reprinted below).
Bed in Summer
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
By Robert Louis Stevenson
It turns out that science backs up the bad weather = longer days equation.
The length of a day is equal to the time it takes for the Earth to complete one full rotation. Scientists can measure Earth’s rotation to an accuracy of about 10 microseconds, or 10 millionths of a second. Rather than being an unchanging constant, Earth’s rotation rate is influenced by the distribution of mass across its surface, such as its fluid core, the ocean, and even the atmosphere.
Significant geological events can cause the planet’s rotational speed to fluctuate. The December 2004 earthquake in Indonesia that spawned a deadly tsunami relocated so much of the planet’s water that it caused the Earth’s rotation to speed up by 2.68 microseconds. Even man-made structures can have an impact, such as the Chinese dam we wrote about here that is so big that it slowed the Earth by 0.06 microseconds per day.
The specific relevant content for this request, if necessary, delimited with characters: Astronomers have noted these tiny changes for centuries. In 1695, English astronomer Sir Edmund Halley thought he was documenting an increase in the moon’s orbital speed. He was correct that something was going on, but it was the slowing of the earth, instead.
Today, advanced scientific instruments allow us to make precise measurements. Global Positioning System satellites, for example, allow scientists to track Earth’s movements to within a few millimeters. This has allowed geophysicists to take real-time measurements and assess them against the factors that influence Earth’s movement.
One of the most important factors in the variable length of the day is the weather, particularly intense meteorological activity. Strong storms bring variations in the intensity and direction of the wind. This, in turn, affects the circulations of ocean water, can stir up sand storms and increase the density of the surface atmosphere, and affect the high-altitude jet streams which influence weather patterns across the globe. On April 17, 2008, for instance, the day lasted 1.1686 milliseconds longer than usual.
We are big supporters of the movement to do away with the barbaric practice of switching back and forth from Daylight Saving Time every few months. (The practice was all started as a result of a practical joke, after all.) We would, however, gladly throw our support behind any legislation that will appropriately compensate us for all these extra microseconds of rainy weather.
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