Days on Earth used to last just 19 hours, but how? Scientists have the answer

During a particularly violent period in Earth's history, everything nearly came to a stop. Geochemical processes oozed, tectonic activity decreased, and the evolution of life in its most basic forms had no impact.

New evidence reveals that the boring billion, as it is sometimes known, occurred when Earth was suspended in a state of perpetual rotation, an orb whirling through space with one day (one revolution) taking only 19 hours, reported Science Alert.

As per thestudy conducted by two geophysicists, the 'stalling' of Earth's day duration at 19 hours occurred approximately onebillion years ago and was caused by a delicate balance of conflicting factors at that time.

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The Moon was then closer to Earth and maintained a consistent distance from it rather than sliding out of its gravitational hold as it has done in the past and afterwards.

"Over time, the Moon has stolen Earth's rotational energy to boost it into a higher orbit farther from Earth," Ross Mitchell of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Uwe Kirscher of Curtin University in Australia explain in their published paper.

The Moon's outward motion causes the Earth's rotation to slow down, and as a result, our sunny days gradually become longer.

Numerous studies have already examined how Earth's days are elongating, according to some current estimates, at a rate of a little more than 0.000015 seconds every year.

The majority of Earth's rotation models used in research like this one indicate that the duration of the day on our planet has grown consistently during the last threeto fourbillion years. According to a 2018 study, for instance, one Earth day 1.4 billion years ago lasted 18 hours.

However, there is another group of scientists who have hypothesised - at least since 1987 - that perhaps Earth's day length flattened for a considerable amount of time before starting to climb slowly and steadily up to the 24 hours we now refer to as a day.

However, it is difficult to find any geological evidence of a change in the Earth's rotation. The development of stromatolites that are oriented towards the Sun and tidal rhythmites, patterns of mud deposits spread out by tides and preserved in rock, can both be used to estimate the duration of the day. However, these are hardly ever maintained in the past.

Mitchell and Kirscher used an abundance of recent geological data that has arisen to their advantage in this new investigation. The cyclostratigraphy data are records of cyclic variations in the temperature of Earth caused by astronomical influences, such as the wobble and axial tilt of the planet.

"We realised that it was finally time to test a kind of fringe, the completely reasonable, alternative idea about Earth's paleorotation," Mitchell told Sciencealert.

What does their research say?

According to their statistical research, Earth's day duration flattened between twoand one billion years ago, in the middle of the Proterozoic epoch, which culminated with "Snowball Earth" and came before the Cambrian explosion of life.

Mitchell and Kirscher examined past significant moments in the rocky history of our planet to try to determine what would have caused early Earth to enter a period of relative stability.

If their calculations are true, the plateau in day duration came after dramatic changes in the atmosphere of early Earth, particularly the Great Oxidation Event, when oxygen levels surged and produced an ozone layer before falling once more.

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