It's not your imagination: spring is getting shorter every year

Friday, March 27, 2015, 12:31 PM - Often caught between long winters and memorable summers, spring often feels short.

But it's not just a feeling. In fact spring has been losing time to summer for years and will continue to do so for the next thousand years.

An Earth movement called precession means that the planet isn't aligned exactly the same way every year when the planet reaches the vernal equinox.

This year, summer is the longest season clocking in at 93.65 days, spring has 92.76 days while winter is the shortest season—even when it doesn't feel like it—with just a total of 88.99

But experts think that will change in the next thousand years. The time spring loses to summer every year means that by the year 3000 spring will be about a day shorter!

But why does this happen

The key to the disappearing season is the fact that Earth has an tilted axis of 23.5 degrees. It means that the world is leaning toward the sun six months a year. Because of the tilt the exact moment, spring turns into summer is coming earlier in the year.

By the year 8860, spring will be four days shorter than it is now.

A race toward summer.

This year is a treat for those counting down the seconds toward the warmest season of the year. Summer 2015 will arrive a little faster thanks to a phenomenon known as a leap second.

The concept was created to make sure that our tracking of time was perfectly matching the Earth's rotation speed which is affected by the moon, powerful earhtquakes and even large-scale weather events.

"The very first leap seconds were added to the UTC clock in 1972, on both June 30 and December 31," explains Scott Sutherland. "It's decided whenever the two methods of keeping time are going to differ by more than 0.9 seconds."

Source: Live Science