As absurd as it may seem, as a recent study published on shows us Nature Geoscience, between one and two billion years ago the days on our planet would have lasted even 19 hours. Let’s find out what lies behind this curiosity.
As stated by Ross Mitchell, geophysicist of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Uwe Kirscher directly from the University of Tübingen in Germany, all this should have to the effect of the influence of the Moon and the Sun on the rotation of the Earth. After seeing what would happen if the Earth rotated in the opposite direction, here’s a much more concrete curiosity.
So it would seem that once upon a time there were days shorter than the current ones due to the greater proximity of the Moon which then, subsequently moving away, would have literally slowed down the Earth’s rotation, consequently causing a lengthening of the days themselves.
The researchers arrived at these conclusions through the use of the cyclostratigraphy, or that particular geological analysis technique which studies the layers of sediments to identify all those periodic variations which obviously reflect the various environmental changes produced by modifications of the earth’s orbit and rotation. The results are amazing. Between one and two billion years ago, the duration of a full day would have stabilized at about 19 hoursbut not only.
It would be created a real stalematedue both to the tidal forces exerted by the Moon on one side which tend to slow down the rotation, and by the forces exerted by the Sun on the atmosphere, which instead do nothing but accelerate it.
Also, as if that weren’t enough, in that period a slowdown of biological evolution is also observed. Emblematic is therefore the fact that it is called “boring billion“, literally “the boring billion years”, which probably not even the longest-lived civilization on Earth would have been able to remedy.