Originally Posted By: paul
think of the earth and moon attached together by a string.
...
of course we should not leave out that the melting ice will have moved closer to the center of the earths mass as it melts , speeding up the earths rotation to that degree.


Paul, thanks for that description.
As soon as you mentioned the string, I got the "opposite-side" tide thing.

I have to ask about the last paragraph though. I was just thinking about the melting ice too; but thought it would carry mass away from the CG (axis?), and hence slow rotation down a bit.
I was thinking an analogy might be a spinning ice skater shifting a mouthpiece from mouth to an extended hand. Probably it'd be perceptible, but only measurable with atomic clocks.

Which of us is missing something (or centrifugally dyslexic)?
grin

Pyrolysis creates reduced carbon! ...Time for the next step in our evolutionary symbiosis with fire.