19-Hour Days for a Billion Years of Earth's History
hubie writes:
19-Hour Days for a Billion Years of Earth's History: Study:
It's tough accomplishing everything we want to get done in a day. But it would have been even more difficult had we lived earlier in Earth's history.
Although we take the 24-hour day for granted, in Earth's deep past, days were even shorter.
Day length was shorter because the Moon was closer. "Over time, the Moon has stolen Earth's rotational energy to boost it into a higher orbit farther from Earth," said Ross Mitchell, geophysicist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of a new study published in Nature Geoscience.
"Most models of Earth's rotation predict that day length was consistently shorter and shorter going back in time," said Uwe Kirscher, co-author of the study and a research fellow now at Curtin University in Australia.
But a slow and steady change in day length going back in time is not what Mitchell and Kirscher found.
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Journal Reference:
Mitchell, R.N., Kirscher, U. Mid-Proterozoic day length stalled by tidal resonance. Nat. Geosci. 16, 567-569 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01202-6
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