Day on Earth extended
Good news for those who don’t have the time: as soon as the Moon is from the Earth, the days become longer; 1.4 billion years ago the duration of the earth day was only 18 hours.
When geologists say that billions of years ago the Earth was different, it usually is about oxygen-free atmosphere, hot climate, unrecognizable shapes of continents and oceans. Once on the Ground half a billion years ago, you wouldn’t know their home planet because the day was shorter then than now, for six hours. In a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of American geologists leading the evaluation of changes in the length of earth days as it approached the moon and the tilt of earth’s axis.
“The moon is slowly moving away from the Earth, and our planet behaves like a skater who starts spinning and slowly extends his arms, slowing the rotation,” explains Geology Professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Stephen Meyer (Stephen Meyers), one of the authors of the study. The article group Mayer describes a statistical method by which they were able to calculate the speed of rotation of the Earth one and a half thousand million years ago. Obtained with this data will help to create accurate models of climate change of the Earth in its distant past.
On the motion of the Earth in space is affected by many factors: the gravitational influence of the Sun, moon and planets of the Solar system; under their action, changing the angle of inclination of the earth’s axis, the speed of its rotation around the axis and speed of movement along the orbit, the inclination of the orbit and its geometry. When you change one or more of these parameters, and changing the amount of sunlight and heat received by the Earth as a whole and its separate parts, and dose reaching the Earth solar radiation; all this, combined with the atmospheric factors that determines the climate of the planet. Climate change, in turn, leave a mark in the geological record. Mayer and his colleagues hope with the new calculations to align geological data on the Earth’s climate in the past and our understanding of the dynamics of the earth’s rotation.