Ancient eclipse records show that days on Earth are getting just a little longer

The latest findings in Earth science are brought to you by ancient astronomers who observed the heavens as much as 2,700 years ago.

Thanks to hundreds of records of lunar and solar eclipses carved in clay tablets and written into dynastic histories, modern scientists have determined that the amount of time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation on its axis has slowed by 1.8 milliseconds per day over the course of a century, according to a report published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

It may not sound significant, but over the course of 2½ millenniums, that time discrepancy adds up to about 7 hours.

In other words, if humanity had been measuring time with an atomic clock that started running back in 700 BC, today that clock would read 7 p.m. when the sun is directly overhead rather than noon.

“There is time and then there is how fast the Earth spins,” said Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, who was not involved with the work. “Traditionally those things are closely linked, but they are not the same.”

Our earliest ancestors measured time based on the position of celestial bodies in the sky, such as the rising and setting of the sun or the changing shape of the moon. Scientists refer to this as Universal Time, and it is governed by the dynamic gravitational motions of the Earth, moon and sun.

Terrestrial Time, on the other hand, is measured by clocks and is independent of planetary motiont. Since the 1960s, it has been tracked by exquisitely precise atomic clocks. According to our modern take on Terrestrial Time, there are exactly 86,400 seconds in a day and each second is defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133 atom.

At that rate of change the day was 7 hours shorter 40,000 years ago when cavemen were hunting mammoths.

I don't know, I'm no scientist. But the rate of change varies and is inconsistent, due to changes within the Earth and celestial events. I would suppose shifting of the Earth's core and magnetic poles, crustal movements, etc. affect the rate of change, as do bombardments of external bodies into the Earth and Moon, as well as effects from solar storms. What I find hard to believe is that people were cavemen hunting mammoths not too long ago rather than building civilized societies. Well, some of us are building civilization.

I really didn’t want to click on a LA Times article, as they’re about as socialist libtard as you can get. But I figured it was a science article and would give them the hit as a reward for printing something that *shouldn’t* have a bunch of biased, political opinion in it. Boy, was I WRONG.

[Other observations came from Islamic astronomers working in the Arab world between AD 800 and 1000, as well as from mentions of solar and lunar eclipses in medieval European chronicles, mostly written in Latin.

“The Arab timing of solar eclipses in particular is superb,” Stephenson said. (He could not say the same for the European data.) ]

and

[“In 90% of the cases in the Chinese and Babylonian records, their dates reproduce exactly to the date of the calculated eclipse,” he said. “This gives us a lot of confidence in our data set.”]

Notice that the scientist is quoted as saying “Arab” while the LA Slimes writes in the previous paragraph “Islamic”.

If I remember right, it would have probably been Persian astronomers, rather than Islamic. Islam wouldn’t have had much to do with them, other than beheading them for their beliefs if it went the least bit against Mo-ham-head’s delusions.

And the later quote states “Babylonian”, not Islamic. Babylonians had been around since the 18th century BC. And they used the Sumerian calendar, which dates from around 21st century BC. Mo-ham-head wasn’t around to start beheading until the 8th century AD. Or about 29 centuries later.

But naturally, the Slimes HAS to slant even articles based on scientific information to let us know how wonderful and great Islam is and how much it has contributed to the overall scientific, cultural and philosophical fields since time immemorial.

I wonder if young Deborah Netburn is a product of our government indoctrination school system. Well, no, I actually don’t wonder.

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