Is Today Really The Shortest In MT History?

Is Today Really the Shortest Day in History? A bunch of websites are reporting that today could be the SHORTEST DAY IN HISTORY. It seems here in Montana our days are long and hot all summer long. Maybe it feels that way because us Montana kids are always just doing the most!

Non-stop go is kind of our jam. So many things to do all summer long. Kids out of school. Family vacations. Various events in and around town.

A bunch of sites are reporting that today is the shortest day in HISTORY but turns out it's not.  It is expected to be 1.3 milliseconds shorter than a normal day all due to the shifts in how fast the Earth rotates. The actual record happened last year on July 5th; it was a whole 1.66 milliseconds shy of a full 24 hours.

HERE IS HOW IT WORKS: The rotation of the Earth speeds up and slows down depending on a few things.  The biggest factor is how far away the Moon is.

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HERE IS THE GOOD NEWS:  If you're having a rough one today will be 1.3 MILLISECONDS shorter than normal.  That's just over ONE ONE-THOUSANDTH of a second you won't have to do.

THE BAD NEWS: You won't notice, and it's NOT actually a record.  DailyMail went full blown click-bait with their well worded headline calling it the "shortest day in history."  But according to calculations, it won't even be the shortest day of 2025. Lies. All lies.

July 22nd will be 1.38 milliseconds shorter than normal.  And August 5th will be the shortest day of the year at 1.5 milliseconds shy of a full 24 hours. There's an outside chance the Earth spins slightly faster than expected today.

Nerd Alert:  1.66 is just the record since we started tracking this stuff with atomic clocks in the 1970s.  Billions of years ago, experts think the average day was only 19 hours long because the Moon was closer.