This is a very interesting piece of research: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/4/e1501693.abstract
His primary claim is that melting ice has caused the earths axis to change, which is major news indeed. His secondary claim, which is where it gets on topic for us, is that most of, possibly all, the decadal variability in Earth Orientation is due to water transport, for instance the major shifts of water which El Nino causes. I asked him the obvious question (on twitter): "Any chance this also explains "the missing leap seconds" ('98-'05) ?" to which he replied: "I am not sure about that!" Which sounds like there could be another article in his data. If we are _really_ lucky, there is a way to improve prediction of future leap-seconds in that. It will be interesting to see if this El Nino also causes a pause. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs