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I said nothing of the sort.lazypast said:im just curious, D H said something about the rate of radius increase to be the same as that of 1bn year ago.
I said exactly the opposite:
D H said:Actually, the slowing of the Earth's rotation rate has increased in the recent past (recent being relative to the 4.6 billion year age of the Earth).
What kind of evidence do we have of this? Fossil records indicate the Earth-Moon distance was 96.5% of its present value 620 million years ago. Averaged over that 620 million year period, this corresponds to a mean recession rate of about 2.2 cm/yr, which is considerably less than the current rate of 3.82±0.07 cm/yr. Records in the rocks take us back even further. The Earth-Moon distance was 90.6% of its present value 2.45 billion years ago. This corresponds to an even smaller recession rate of about 1.5 cm/yr on average for the last 2.45 billion years. We can go even further back in time. The rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts have been dated to 4.4 to 4.5 billion years old. The Moon has been around for a long, long time.
Bottom line: The current recession rate is anomalistically high.
References:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000RvGeo..38...37W
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html