One complete rotation of the Earth on its own axis takes 24 hours, which is also known as one day. This rotation is heavily influenced by other astronomical bodies, including the Moon, which is slowly but steadily drifting away from the Earth, directly impacting the rotational speed of the Earth, suggests a study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists have now speculated that 1.4 billion years ago, the Earth completed one rotation in 18 hours, and the rotation speed is continuously decreasing as the Moon drifts away from the Earth. This study was done on rock from a formation aged 90 million years, to analyse the Earth’s interaction with the Moon. The Moon is currently 3,84,400 km away from Earth, and it takes exactly 27.3 days to complete one full rotation around the Earth.
According to Stephen Meyers, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “As the moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out. Beyond about 1.5 billion years ago, the Moon would have been close enough that its gravitational interactions with the Earth would have ripped the moon apart.”
However, it is also known that the Moon is at least 4.5 billion years old, which suggests that the study might not be entirely right.
Meyers, in collaboration with Alberto Malinverno, Lamont Research Professor at Columbia, developed TimeOptMCMC, a statistical approach to assess the geological record variation, which also helped them to determine the relationship between the length of the day and the distance between the Moon and the Earth.
As per the study, the Moon is drifting away at a pace of 3.82 centimetres a year, which could result in 25-hour long days on Earth 200 million years from now. Scientists call these variations “Milankovitch cycles”, and they determine where the sunlight is distributed on the Earth along with the climate rhythms.
This isn’t exactly a new discovery, as there were many similar studies published such as the solar system chaos by the Russian scientist Jacques Laskar back in 1989. However, the University of Wisconsin’s study further emphasises how the Moon’s drifting could directly affect the Earth. Scientists are also looking at studying much older rocks to get a more profound understanding of the relationship between the Moon and the Earth.
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