Great article! At first I was wondering if there was fewer hours on earth, then there would have to be more days for it to go around the sun. But it appears that the moon moving away from earth...
Great article!
At first I was wondering if there was fewer hours on earth, then there would have to be more days for it to go around the sun.
But it appears that the moon moving away from earth slowed down the rotation of our blue planet, giving more hours in the day.
To be sure, 19 hour days would suck in todays world.
I'm not a specialist, but something struck me as interesting about their research methods, and maybe someone here who knows more can extend on my comment. What they want to do is detect a cycle...
I'm not a specialist, but something struck me as interesting about their research methods, and maybe someone here who knows more can extend on my comment.
What they want to do is detect a cycle that occurs on the order of a day, but rocks and sediment (I think?) don't accrete/deposit fast enough for layers formed over the span of a day to be visible. So instead, they found a more indirect way of detecting it: use the Milankovitch cycle, which varies regularly over the course of 100,000-ish years instead. If you look at cycles that long, they can actually show up in the geological record. I'm assuming that they worked backwards from the Milankovitch cycle data to find the length of a day, and the data they found gave an irregular progression rather than a smooth one, which is the big surprise of this research.
The rest is completely over my head, and I'd love to know more, so if anybody can give some insight, that would be amazing!
What I am interested in learning is what finally disrupted the tidal resonance and allowed for lunar tides to start slowing us down to today's day length
What I am interested in learning is what finally disrupted the tidal resonance and allowed for lunar tides to start slowing us down to today's day length
Great article!
At first I was wondering if there was fewer hours on earth, then there would have to be more days for it to go around the sun.
But it appears that the moon moving away from earth slowed down the rotation of our blue planet, giving more hours in the day.
To be sure, 19 hour days would suck in todays world.
I'm not a specialist, but something struck me as interesting about their research methods, and maybe someone here who knows more can extend on my comment.
What they want to do is detect a cycle that occurs on the order of a day, but rocks and sediment (I think?) don't accrete/deposit fast enough for layers formed over the span of a day to be visible. So instead, they found a more indirect way of detecting it: use the Milankovitch cycle, which varies regularly over the course of 100,000-ish years instead. If you look at cycles that long, they can actually show up in the geological record. I'm assuming that they worked backwards from the Milankovitch cycle data to find the length of a day, and the data they found gave an irregular progression rather than a smooth one, which is the big surprise of this research.
The rest is completely over my head, and I'd love to know more, so if anybody can give some insight, that would be amazing!
What I am interested in learning is what finally disrupted the tidal resonance and allowed for lunar tides to start slowing us down to today's day length