Sep 23, 2023 01:20 AM
https://youtu.be/-rEiywnAra0
VIDEO EXCERPT: ... They found the length of a day didn't lengthen continuously like some had assumed. In fact, for a time that almost perfectly overlaps with the boring billion. It hit pause at 19 hours long and the team doesn't actually think this is a coincidence.
Their paper proposes that a lot of these pauses are all connected, and that life set it all off. Like more specifically, the evolution of those photosynthetic cyanobacteria that indirectly created our ozone layer.
Thanks to all of those ozone molecules floating around, the atmosphere suddenly became a lot better at absorbing heat from the Sun. That increased the sun's torque to the point where it balanced out the torque from the Moon, so the Earth's spin, because of cyanobacteria, stopped slowing down, holding steady at 19 hours a day.
By maintaining that steady spin rate that could have helped put the Earth's tectonic plates into their own sort of kinetic stasis not moving very much relative to one another. Which as I mentioned before, may have affected how fast life evolved.
As for what triggered the end of the boring billion, the team isn't sure. However, it happened. We know know that Earth's days started lengthening again and that would mean that there would be more and more minutes of sunlight for photosynthetic organisms to produce oxygen in a given day.
So the fact that Earth escaped a billion year period of 19-hour days could explain the increase in oxygen at the end of the boring billion; and having access to even more oxygen may have been what stopped evolution from twiddling its proverbial thumbs and creating more complex multicellular life.
Of course, this is just one hypothesis. The various pauses that occurred during the boring billion could have had multiple causes...
The Earth's "Boring Billion" years were anything but
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-rEiywnAra0
VIDEO EXCERPT: ... They found the length of a day didn't lengthen continuously like some had assumed. In fact, for a time that almost perfectly overlaps with the boring billion. It hit pause at 19 hours long and the team doesn't actually think this is a coincidence.
Their paper proposes that a lot of these pauses are all connected, and that life set it all off. Like more specifically, the evolution of those photosynthetic cyanobacteria that indirectly created our ozone layer.
Thanks to all of those ozone molecules floating around, the atmosphere suddenly became a lot better at absorbing heat from the Sun. That increased the sun's torque to the point where it balanced out the torque from the Moon, so the Earth's spin, because of cyanobacteria, stopped slowing down, holding steady at 19 hours a day.
By maintaining that steady spin rate that could have helped put the Earth's tectonic plates into their own sort of kinetic stasis not moving very much relative to one another. Which as I mentioned before, may have affected how fast life evolved.
As for what triggered the end of the boring billion, the team isn't sure. However, it happened. We know know that Earth's days started lengthening again and that would mean that there would be more and more minutes of sunlight for photosynthetic organisms to produce oxygen in a given day.
So the fact that Earth escaped a billion year period of 19-hour days could explain the increase in oxygen at the end of the boring billion; and having access to even more oxygen may have been what stopped evolution from twiddling its proverbial thumbs and creating more complex multicellular life.
Of course, this is just one hypothesis. The various pauses that occurred during the boring billion could have had multiple causes...
The Earth's "Boring Billion" years were anything but