> I'm not a geophysicist, but I too have noted what Tom reports. I've attached > a plot that by coincidence I just made last week. > > The best hand-waiving arguments I've heard for these recent "decadal > fluctuations" > is that the oblateness of the Earth is changing, possibly due to the ice caps > changing. > Short-term fluctuations are much better understood, and they correlate very > strongly > with the atmospheric angular momentum. > > Demetrios,
Thanks for sharing that one. Now, do you dare join the club and predict the year when we hit 86400.000? For a longer-term view, attached are two plots from a 2010 paper "Long-Periodical Variations of Earth Rotation, Determined from Reconstructed Millennial-Scale Glacial Sea Level" by Chapanov & Gambis translating mean sea level to excess LOD. See also the 2003 Nature paper "Sea-level fluctuations during the last glacial cycle" by Siddall & Rohling. One of these papers is from "New challenges for reference systems and numerical standards in astronomy" http://syrte.obspm.fr/jsr/journees2010/pdf/ Or I can email you copies. I have the raw data here somewhere too. /tvb
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