Earth's day likely to increase to 25 hours in the future: research

A recent study published in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has revealed that the moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of approximately 3.8 centimetres per year.

The increasing distance between the Earth and the Moon will have a significant impact on the length of days on both planets. 

Currently, a day on Earth is 24 hours long, but as the Moon continues to move away, a day on Earth will eventually become 25 hours long, the researchers said.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted the study, which reports that the Moon has been shining in the Earth's sky for billions of years. 

The team found that the Moon's increasing distance from Earth will slow down the rotation of our planet, resulting in longer days.

The study's findings suggest that if this trend continues, the duration of Earth's day will increase to 25 hours in the next 20 million years.

Interestingly, the researchers also discovered that one billion and 40 million years ago, the duration of one day on Earth was only 18 hours.

"As the Moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out," Stephen Meyers, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

"One of our ambitions was to use astrochronology to tell time in the most distant past, to develop very ancient geological time scales," he added.

"The tidal drag on the Earth slows its rotation down and the Moon gains that energy as angular momentum," David Waltham, a professor of geophysics at Royal Holloway, University of London, told Bloomberg.

Currently, the Moon is an average of 384,400km (238,855 miles) away from Earth. It takes nearly a month to orbit Earth, which is 27.3 days to complete a revolution.