Did you know? August 5 is one of the shortest days ever in decades: Here's why

What has sparked a curiosity amid the scientific minds is that the Earth has been rotating faster and as such, August 5, that is today will be one of the shortest days on record, a report in Time and Date said.

While earthlings might not feel the speeding up of the planet, this has occurred a few times over the past few years. Today's speed up of the earth's rotation has shortened the day by between 1.25 and 1.51 milliseconds, the report said.

This is also the third time the planet has been rotating faster this year with July 10 and July 22 being the other two dates when this happened.

For a reference point, Earth generally takes approximately 86,400 seconds to make one full rotation. One millisecond is 0.001 seconds. As such, while this will not really affect us in any way, this is definitely an interesting factor in how we know days and nights to come to be.

Why is the earth rotating faster?

While there are no concrete reasons for this occurrence, experts say this could be due to the Moon's current position over our planet. When the moon is further north or south than Earth's equator, it can impact how fast the planet spins.

Apart from the Earth's natural satellite impacting its rotation, the speeding up can also be related to changes in the Earth's inner core or atmospheric circulation patterns.

Redistribution of mass from melting glaciers might be responsible too for Earth's acceleration, and El Nino and La Nina events, which redistribute mass around the globe, could also impact the rotation, scientists feel.

Has this happened before?

While this might be a recent occurrence for us, dinosaurs reportedly knew this phenomenon first. Approximately 245 million years ago when the gigantic animals were ruling the planet, the days were an hour and a half shorter than they are today.

Since then, the rotation started to slow down and official records have it that since 1973, when official records started to be kept, the Earth's rotation has been slowing.