Re: Earth's Axial Tilt (posted for D. Campbell)

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Date: Fri, 15 Dec 1995 16:46:05 -0500
To: paleonet-owner@nhm.ac.uk
From: bivalve@email.unc.edu (David Campbell)
Subject: Re: Earth's Axial Tilt (posted for T. Hansen)
Status: O

As long as angular momentum is conserved (not forgetting changes in the
Earth-Moon distance), I think one can fiddle a good deal with such things.
At least I'm told (in class, so I'd best accept it as true for now, anyway)
that there's no particular reason to suppose that the Milankovitch cycle
durations were constant or even in roughly the same proportions in the past
as now, and one of them has to do with the tilt.
If you subscribe to the moon as a chunk of debris from a Mars-sized body
impacting the Earth theory, that probably could have drastically altered
the tilt.

David Campbell   "old seashells"
Department of Geology
CB 3315 Mitchell Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-3315
bivalve@email.unc.edu