REAL LIFE NEWS: THE DAYS ARE GETTING LONGER
by Hazed
The Earth’s rotation is slowing down which means the days are getting longer. But don’t start planning what to do with the extra time, because it’s happening too slowly to notice – just 1/75,000th of a second is added to the day’s length each year.
Still, looking back a billion years or thereabouts, the day was five hours and fifteen minutes shorter than it is now. This was well before complex life spread around the planet, so there was nobody around to experience these much shorter days.
Scientists figured this out using a combination of astronomical theory and geochemical signatures buried in ancient rocks.
The reason for the change in day length is that the moon is slowly – very slowly – moving away from the Earth. In the past 1.4 billion years it’s drifted about 44,000km further out. Over the next billion or so years it’s going to move even further away, until eventually it will reach a stable distance, at which point it will only be visible from one half of the Earth.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/04/the-days-are-getting-longer-but-very-very-slowly
