The Earth days will be shorter on 9 July, 22 July and 5 August but we won’t feel any difference. Could it be the Chinese playing around?

The Earth’s rotation is speeding up again — starting 9 July our days will be measurably shorter, down by more than a millisecond. It’s a baffling reversal of decades of slowing, and experts are sounding the alarm as the cause of this acceleration remains a mystery.

Scientists tracking our planet’s spin using atomic clocks have identified three upcoming days — 9 July, 22 July, and 5 August 2025 — that are expected to be among the shortest ever recorded. On those days, our planet will complete its full rotation in well under 86,400 seconds (24 hours), the benchmark length of a standard day.

A millisecond (ms) is 0.001 seconds — considerably less than a blink of an eye, which lasts around 100 milliseconds.

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The length of day (LOD) is now regularly dipping below previous records, with 2024’s shortest day clocking in at -1.66 milliseconds on 5 July, according to the time monitoring platform TimeandDate.com. And 2025 may come close to that number again.

What makes this trend so curious is that it defies the pattern. Since 1972, scientists had been adding “leap seconds” to clocks due to a slow deceleration in the Earth’s rotation. Now, the opposite is happening.

Researchers believe several factors could be at play — from the Moon’s orbit to powerful earthquakes that shift the planet’s mass. One theory suggests that when the Moon is farthest from Earth’s equator, the planet spins faster. The three dates identified in 2025 align with such lunar positions.

But known atmospheric and oceanic models haven’t accounted for the scale of the acceleration. And the biggest culprit may lie beneath our feet.

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“Most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth,” says Leonid Zotov, a leading expert in the Earth’s rotation at the Moscow State University. “Ocean and atmospheric models don’t explain this huge acceleration.”

A 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan in 2011, for instance, was believed to have shortened Earth’s days slightly by knocking the planet’s axis off by 6.5 inches. But nothing of that magnitude has occurred recently — making the current acceleration even more puzzling.

There may be also another cause of acceleration – a massive dam in China. NASA scientists recently discovered that the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric power station in the world, is actually slightly slowing down the planet’s rotation.

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Spanning over 2 kilometers across the Yangtze River in Hubei province and standing 185 meters tall, it produces 22,500 megawatts of electricity — more than the power output of many countries. But according to new research from NASA, the dam’s enormous reservoir is also affecting the planet’s movement.

The reservoir holds about 40 billion cubic meters of water. This vast amount of mass, when concentrated in one location, subtly changes how the Earth spins. Specifically, by redistributing weight closer to the equator, it has increased the planet’s moment of inertia — essentially making it slightly harder for Earth to spin, like a figure skater extending their arms.

The result: the length of a day has increased by about 0.06 microseconds.

What is the Chinese decided to let the flow run, perhaps unintentionally for the planetary spinning?

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