Given that the earth's rotation has been slowing down by very slight amounts over time, forcing us to introduce leap seconds and so forth into our clocks and calendars, I would like to ask if this could be fixed by "generating" more spin via some sort of power plant like structure(s) with a massive spinning object. (would it be ideal for these to be on the equator?)
How much energy would be needed in order to change the length of a year by 1 second?
what about in order to eliminate February 29th such that we don't need a "leap day" anymore? (24 hours over 4 years) - note that for this, the spin would need to be altered such that the day is removed, but then returned to near its original state such that we don't keep losing days
related Q/A: the earth IS slowing down (rotationally)
Answer
A day is currently about 86400.002 seconds long. If we could just increase the Earth's rotation rate by a mere 2 milliseconds per day we would get rid of the need for those pesky leap seconds. No problem! We only need something that rotates with an angular momentum of 1.4×1026 joule-seconds about an axis pointing due south.
One way to do this would be to build a train track around the Earth at the equator. I'll assume a 20 meter long train car with a gross mass of 150,000 kg moving at bullet train speeds, 320 km/hour. There's room for about two million cars on this track. That gets us to 1.7×1020 joule-seconds. We would only need 800,000 such circum-equatorial trains. Alternatively, we would only need one such train if we could make the train move at 0.23 c.
Another approach would be to place a large rotating disc at the South Pole. For example, a uranium disc with a radius of 20 kilometers and a height of 28 meters rotating at 10,000 RPM will just about do it.
In other words, it can't be done.
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