{"id":242592,"date":"2026-08-12T13:08:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T18:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/for-roughly-a-billion-years-of-earths-deep-past-the-moons-ocean-tides-may-have-slowed-the-planet-while-a-sundriven-atmospheric-tide-sped-it-up-holding-the-day-near-19-hours-rocks-p"},"modified":"2026-08-12T13:08:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T18:08:04","slug":"for-roughly-a-billion-years-of-earths-deep-past-the-moons-ocean-tides-may-have-slowed-the-planet-while-a-sundriven-atmospheric-tide-sped-it-up-holding-the-day-near-19-hours-rocks-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/for-roughly-a-billion-years-of-earths-deep-past-the-moons-ocean-tides-may-have-slowed-the-planet-while-a-sundriven-atmospheric-tide-sped-it-up-holding-the-day-near-19-hours-rocks-p","title":{"rendered":"For roughly a billion years of Earth\u2019s deep past, the Moon\u2019s ocean tides may have slowed the planet while a Sundriven atmospheric tide sped it up, holding the day near 19 hours rocks preserve a hypothesis, not a stopwatch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6e5ZFSI9lz4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Calling this a tug-of-war makes the mechanism vivid, but there was no rope, no conscious contest and perhaps no clean moment when one side \u201cwon\u201d. There were two transfers of angular momentum whose strengths depended on a planet that was itself continually changing.<\/p>\n<p>That is the version I find most persuasive to hold lightly. Earth\u2019s day may have remained near 19 hours for an interval longer than complex animals have existed, because sunlight organised the air in just the right rhythm to counter the Moon\u2019s pull on the sea. The evidence is suggestive, the mechanism is physically plausible, and neither is final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Calling this a tug-of-war makes the mechanism vivid, but there was no rope, no conscious contest and perhaps no clean moment when one side \u201cwon\u201d. There were two transfers of angular momentum whose strengths depended on a planet that was itself continually changing. That is the version I find most persuasive to hold lightly. Earth\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}