It’s that time between Christmas and New Year when it’s hard to figure out what’s happening when, or if you’re supposed to be doing it. One theory is that, if you lie still long enough the answers might come to you.

The best news for us in this part of the world is that the daylight hours are getting longer. The weather might be cartwheeling in new directions, but so far the world is still turning as it always has. I typed that last sentence full of confidence … and then I began to wonder. Is Earth turning as it always has? And if so, why is it turning? And the biggest question, will it keep turning?

I am no scientist but it seems that the answer to the first question is yes. The Earth is turning as it always has, and the reason why it continues to spin as it does is apparently something to do with the explosions that formed it initially, and sent it spinning … on and on and on. The only force that seems to be slowing this spin down at all is the Moon’s gravity which is pulling on it very slightly, slowing the planet’s spin, shaving tiny, tiny percentages of merest milliseconds off its rotations over the centuries since it formed.

I shall now abandon this topic as it is outside any of the orbits I normally fly around in, but here, in case you’re interested are two articles I found online when checking my easy assumption about the Earth spinning. This article by NASA’s Jet Propulasion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology was written in 1990 and describes how they measured the slowing of Earth’s spin, and this news story on the CNN site was written in January of this year, and talks about how Earth’s inner core may be about to start spinning in the opposite direction.

I’m not sure what they’ve discovered since, but it’s definitely time to lie down for me.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023