Scientists reveal how the changing length of days and nights is going to transform life on Earth

Due to climate change as well as the changes in Earth's inner core, the world has been undergoing drastic changes in the past few decades. Recently, experts revealed that the sun will be setting late leading to longer days and shorter nights. Scientists have also made predictions about how long our days will become in the near future, and while some are afraid of an imminent extinction, others are simply worried about everyday struggles that people might face under the sun.

But there's no reason to get alarmed since a change like this might take place in the next 250 million years. "Earth has experienced days that were both shorter and longer than it is now at different points in history. Most importantly, it was affected by tidal interactions with the Moon. About a billion years ago, the length of day was only about 19 hours," Sarah Millholland, the Assistant Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Live Science.

“Climate change could also play a role due to redistribution of Earth’s mass due to glacial melting, sea level changes, and tectonic activity. As the polar ice caps melt, the rotation is slowing down," she added. Another expert argues that at one point in the future, our planet just might rotate once in 10 hours. However, the pattern of Earth's rotation has been changing over time and it has been slowing down by 1.7 milliseconds every 100 years.

“The change in Earth's spin rate is happening gradually enough that evolutionary processes can adapt to the changes over time. The relative change in orbital speed would not be noticeable in daily life," Konstantin Batygin, of Caltech, explained to the outlet. He believes that the actual reason Earth has slowed down its speed of rotation is due to the moon orbiting around our planet. Profession Stephen Myers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison co-authored a study in 2018, which deduced that days were only 18 hours long 1.4 billion years ago, as opposed to 24 hours in modern times.

The natural satellite moon was also closer to Earth than it is now and due to its strong gravitational pull, the Earth used to rotate much faster taking 18 hours to complete one rotation. "As the Moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out,” Myers added. "So. if it was 18 hours long 1.4 billion years ago, it seems it's highly unlikely we’re going to feel the slow change in day extension for another billion years."

According to Space, the rotational time of Earth is only 24 hours and not more at this point because there is a temporary balance between the gravitational tidal forces from the moon and the sun. The moon is gradually moving away from Earth and is stealing some of its angular momentum, resulting in the Earth rotating gradually slower. A study led by Hanbo Wu and a team of astronomers from the University of Toronto and the University of Bordeaux explained that "it's all related to a balance in the torques created by thermal tides in Earth's atmosphere and the gravitational tides emanating from the moon."