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The climate change is not only affecting life on the earth but also the earth itself, the effect you would have never imagine, it is making the earth's rotation slow. According to the new study, the glaciers melting along the Earth's poles is causing the sea levels to rise and thus affecting the Earth's rotation, making the days slightly longer. Glaciers contain large amount of mass near the Earth's rotation axis, running from pole to pole. When the glaciers melt, this melted water ends up in the ocean, whose volume is mostly near the equator, much farther from the axis. When the mass moves away from the Earth's axis, its rotation slows down, says Mathieu Dumberry, a physics professor at the University of Alberta who co-authored the paper published today in the journal Science Advances.

"The rise of sea level and the melting of glaciers during the 20th century is confirmed not only by some of the most dramatic changes in the Earth system - for example, catastrophic flooding events, droughts [and] heat waves - but also in some of the most subtle - incredibly small changes in Earth's rotation rate," said study lead author Jerry X. Mitrovica, a geophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as per The Space Reporter.

The studies conducted earlier used inaccurate models of the Earth's internal structure and thus, did not estimate correctly how the glaciers would collapse the rock below the glaciers and affect the Earth's rotation. Additionally, the interface between the rocky mantle of the Earth and its molten outer metal core could have also contributed to slow spin of the planet, more than it was thought. Together, these adjustments helped the scientists in determining the glacial melting and the rise in sea level that has affected the Earth in ways that corresponds to the astronomical observations, theoretical predictions and the survey data from the land, says Live Science