If the Earth's rotation is slowing down was it windier in the distant past?
Question
I have a question for you. I have contacted the scientists at NASA, and the National Weather Service, and so far have had no response. I was told that if you spin a planet faster you increase the wind speed. Jupiter and Saturn were given as evidences of that. Since we know the earth is slowing down in its rotation, and we know the rate at which it is slowing down, then if we went backwards in time at that rate, would it have an affect on the wind speed on earth? If we went back far enough in time would it possibly make earth uninhabitable?
Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago is quoted as saying that new research has revealed that the rate at which a planet spins is instrumental in its ability to support life. He also said it affects the winds. Do you have any information on this? Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Dr. Arv Edgeworth
Answer
Adam Townsend put the wind up this one...
Adam - Yeah. I thought this was an absolutely terrific question. The Earth slows down because of its gravitational interactions with the moon. So, every time the moon goes around, it affects the tides, robs the Earth a little bit of some rotation. I can tell you exactly how much it's slowing down. In fact, we lose about 2 milliseconds from the day every 100 years. Kat - Yeah. I suppose over millions of years, that's going to add up.
Adam - In fact, it does. So, if you are interested when we're going to get 25-hour days? 200 million years, so not long. Anyway, to wind, wind is caused by warm. so the air on Earth gets heated up by the sun, rises and this causes a pressure difference because the hot air has gone up and so, cold air needs to be sucked and it's sucked in from the north pole or the south pole where it's colder. So, you end up with a circulation happening. But it's complicated because the Earth is spinning. So this is the famous coriolis force. If you sit on a spinning chair and you spin yourself around, and you throw like a tennis ball in front of you, the tennis ball seem to sort of veer off to the right from your perspective. And so, this confuses things because it means that the wind isn't directly going from the north pole or south pole to the equator. And, what I think is the absolute most interesting, despite the fact that we have these areas of high pressure and low pressure, and you would think therefore the wind goes from the high pressure to the low pressure, it doesn't. Actually, because of the rotation of the Earth, wind travels along lines of constant pressure. This is why we have isobars on newspaper weather reports.
Kat - The little lines when you see it, yeah.
Adam - Yeah, like from the '90s.
Kat - They are being replaced by little arrows now because we're too stupid to understand isobars.
Adam - Right. but yeah, it turns out, wind goes along these and this sort of drops out of the maths of the coriolis force. Anyway, "Was it windier in the past?" is the question. The answer is, it's complicated because lots of things affect it. So, continents slow down wind. If we're standing right here and you want to go back millions of years, well obviously, you have the buildings that are going to make some effect. How much land there is around us? Wind could go slower over land because of friction. So it slows down because.
Kat - So basically, there's lots and lots of things that could've made a difference and we don't really know. We don't know if the dinosaurs were like blown around.
Adam - So in the question they asked, if you spin a planet faster, you increase the wind speed. I'm not convinced. I think there are lots of things that affect wind speed. The effect might in fact go the opposite direction. You can get planets that go around very, very slowly like Venus. Venus has a day of 116 days. It's really slow.
Kat - I don't want to go to Venus and find out if it's windy out there.
Adam - 200 miles an hour, who knew?
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