Day On Earth Was 19 Hours Long For a Billion Years and The Reason is Very Surprising

how wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing some of the new discoveries in regards to the spin of planet Earth and in regards to how much it changed in the last few billions of years but more specifically we're going to be discussing a discovery from a recent study that found something really intriguing about the mysterious period we sometimes referred to as

boring billion the period on planet Earth that lasted exactly as it sounds a billion years during which surprisingly not a lot actually happened for example the continents remained more or less the same there was not a lot of geological activity anywhere on the planet and even the atmosphere and the temperature on the planet remain the same for a billion years surprisingly there were also no major

impacts either so it's as if someone took fire earth and possibly Frozen in time but life actually still evolved during that time and as you might discover from the recent video in the description there might have been an unusual organism we didn't know existed that could have been dominating the planet for that billionaire but in the more recent study the scientists focused on something else they

actually found evidence that surprisingly even the actual rotation of the planet has not changed a lot remaining at approximately 19 hours per day which by itself is actually really surprising because we expect the rotation of the planet to change quite dramatically over time and so let's discuss this new discovery and all of these findings in more detail but let's start with a brief history of planet

Earth approximately four and a half billion years ago a planet received a collision from an object were referred to as Thea this created modern Earth and our moon both of which you see right there and as both objects evolved over time quite a lot changed on both the moon and planet Earth although more importantly today we know that the moon was obviously much much closer to

planet Earth when it was just formed it was only a few thousand kilometers away from planet Earth in the region we referred to as the Rouge limit or basically origin around the planet or a star where technically the object becomes a ring but by going a little bit farther away the object starts to solidify becoming its own structure and in this case this is how the

moon became the moon and so as the rings around Earth change into a single object at some point the subject started to exhibit a lot of tidal effects on planet Earth today we obviously refer to these as Tides but back then as you can imagine these were much stronger and potentially had extreme effects on the planet that we cannot even imagine but one of these effects

was in regards to the rotation of the planet it's believed that when the planet was just formed it was probably speeding really fast possibly as fast as a single rotation per 4 hours but the moon gradually absorbs some of the Earth's rotation slowing the planet down while at the same time boosting the moon into much higher orbit and So within just thirty thousand years the rotation

decreased by two hours from 4 hours to 6 hours a number of modern calculations create a kind of a curve here basically suggesting that the rotation started to decrease quite dramatically at first but over time decrease the less and less so for example two and a half billion years ago when we believe photosynthesis appeared on a planet it's quite likely that a single day was about

18 hours long intriguing there's actually a study that should be somewhere in the description that even made calculations about how fast the planet has to spin or how slow it has to spin for photosynthesis to actually be efficient enough and to work on a typical Planet if the planet spins really fast and if a single day here is too short it might actually not have enough

daylight for a photosynthetic life to produce anything and so the planetary spin has to be slow enough for the daylight to be just long enough in that paper I believe the daylight had to be over 6 hours long but based on previous mathematical models the Assumption was that the day was still decreasing in time and after about 700 million years or about 1.7 billion years ago

a single day was about 21 hours long whereas when the first multicellular life began on the planet roughly around 1.2 billion years ago the day was already 23 hours long or in most cases most of these are actually based on mathematical modeling not as much as actual samples or actual evidence once again because this was the boring building during that billion years there are not a

lot of samples and very few actual fossils to show us anything about anything but it still made sense at least mathematically and especially because once we find samples and once we see evidence especially in the last billion years or so the changes in Earth rotation become quite obvious and a lot of previous studies especially the ones that produce a really good evidence came from the analysis

of sedimentation rings around ancient corals and many studies using these ancient corals showed that the day was at least one hour shorter millions of years ago you can actually find at least one video in the description that talks a little bit more about this but the evidence here was pretty clear and of course made sense both geologically and physically in terms of what we know about

the moon the title effects from the moon are definitely pooling on the planet slowing it down just enough but all of this was based on much older studies and much older evidence and using much older techniques in the last years the scientists have actually developed new techniques and techniques that use something slightly different one of these techniques is known as psychostratigraphy the study of much longer

Cycles inside various sediments relying on the Cycles we understand from astronomy and the most famous Cycles here would be what's known as milankovic Cycles the occasional changes in the way planet Earth orbits or spins on its own axis which then very often influences certain climatic conditions on the planet and specifically by using precession which usually has cycles of 19 and 23 000 years oblique with a

cycle of 41 000 but also 1.2 million years and the cycles of eccentricity that seem to have periods of hundred thousand four hundred five thousand and 2.4 million years and so even though previous studies mostly relied on these sediments produced as a result of of fluctuations allowing us to discover hours per day in previous geological records now it became possible to study even larger Cycles by

specifically focusing in the changes of orbits and how this then is reflected on the length of the day and so during these Cycles the melancholic Cycles the way that the sediment deposits actually produces these patterns that can be then visible if you study enough of these samples from various locations and precession and obliquity which relate to the wobble and the tilt of the planet seem to

affect these samples the most when all of these sediments creating a kind of a rhythmic layering that would be difficult to explain any other way but all of this data is relatively recent as a matter of fact this project right here the cycle stratigraphy project has mostly collected the majority of the data in just the last 10 years and so none of these studies would even

be possible a decade ago but they're definitely impossible now and this new paper has just discovered something within know about and that's somewhat difficult to explain by looking at these resonances they discovered that the length of the day was more or less stable at approximately 19 hours per spin for nearly 1 billion years during that boring billion only decreasing further in the last 1 billion years

afterwards or in other words the average day on Earth was about 19 hours for that entire geological period during which once again not a lot happened and so instead of decreasing gradually and over time as previously assumed the geological record suggests otherwise it actually does suggest that the rotation changed dramatically prior to this and then changed dramatically afterwards but why and I guess more importantly why

it didn't change for that billion years is of course unknown or maybe unknown because here the scientists propose one potential explanation there's at least one mechanism that can physically affect the spin of the planet and that does not involve the Moon instead it involves the other thing that has tidal effects on planet Earth the Sun and so the reason they believe the rotation was more or

less constant is because of very unusual title effects caused by the sun specifically solar atmospheric tides and so while the tides from the moon are responsible for slowing down the planet or the rotation of the planet and in this case it's mostly the liquid water ties responsible for this here the sun itself would also provide a kind of a push from the charge solar particles that

would very likely heat the atmosphere of the planet and instead of pulling on the planets slowing it down they would instead excite or push on the planet or the planetary atmosphere resulting in the opposite effect speeding the planet up or in other words both the moon and the sun would create a kind of a counterbalance with the overall rotation remain in the same for a billion

years but since the solar tights today are much weaker than before it does not produce the same effects on the planet but the obvious next question is what kind of an atmosphere did the planet have back then in order to allow the Sun to produce these effects although obviously this is just one explanation for now and there's no clear evidence that this is what happened but

because all this is connected to that boring billion it actually makes it even more intriguing and more mysterious what exactly was happening on the planet approximately one to two billion years ago in order to create these unusual stable conditions for such a long period of time it's one of the most mysterious and most intriguing periods in the history of the planet and it seems to have

occurred between two major periods when the planet was at its extreme we had the famous great oxygenation event when the atmosphere of the planet changed dramatically very likely causing the first Extinction event more information in the video in the description and at the end of the boring billion we had the cryogenium period when the earth became snowball Earth which is also the time when the first

animals started to appear on a planet as well very primitive animals but animals nevertheless and so by itself these discoveries right now are really exciting thing but this is just the first such study and more studies with additional evidence and more data points as you can see there's only a handful of data points for this study right now need to be conducted to basically tell us

exactly what happened back then and how Earth was different from today but I guess more importantly the rotation of our planet seems to be related directly to the exact composition of the atmosphere since this happens a little bit after the first oxygenation event when a world of photosynthetic bacteria became extremely prominent on the planet one assumption here is that all of this life that existed on

the planet potentially dramatically transformed the atmosphere through very active photosynthesis that changed the composition so much that it allowed for these unusual solar effects resulting in solar Tides effects so powerful that they lasted for a billion years allowing the planet to ignore the effects from the Moon which was much closer and much more gravitationally potent and so whatever answers we find here they're probably going to

help us discover more about the origin of life and more importantly the origin of complex life because it does actually look like a lot of this seems to be somewhat related the sudden appearance of photosynthetic life seems to be correlated with a boring billion and a sudden appearance of multi-cellular life or more complex life is correlated with ice ball Earth and the emergence of very complex

life on the planet but exactly what happened here and exactly what all this means is not something we're going to know for probably a few years at least possibly longer these are basically brand new techniques based on brand new studies and it will take years and years of Investigation to take us a little bit closer in helping the scientists understand the evolution of life and the

evolution of Earth in the last four and a half billion years but because we had two major studies already and you can learn about the other study in the description below it means that we're probably going to hear more about this in the next few months so once there is another study discovering something else either from the boring billion or from the history of the planet

there's going to be another video in the future thank you for watching subscribe share some song called rainbow space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support this channel on patreon by doing Channel membership or by buying the wonderful personality here you can find in the description stay on the policy tomorrow and as always bye foreign [Music] [Music] oh foreign