Joelle Renstrom teaches writing with a focus on science fiction, space exploration, and artificial intelligence at Boston University. Joelle received a 2012 Somerville Arts Council fellowship grant and a 2013 Writers’ Room of Boston nonfiction fellowship for her work on www.couldthishappen.com. She is also the recipient of the CBC Television Jim Burt Prize in Creative Writing, the Hopwood Award for Poetry, the Virginia Voss Writing Award, and the Wesleyan Writers Conference Scholarship. Read Joelle’s other publications.
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Joelle’s collection of essays, Closing the Book, will be published by Pelekinesis in August, 2015. Her work has also appeared in Slate, Guernica, Praxis Magazine, Briarpatch, Paradigm, the Allegheny Review, Ducts, and others. A chapbook of her poetry was published by the University of Arkansas Press and in 2008 she collaborated with an artist on an ekphrastic publication of painting and poetry.
Follow Joelle on Twitter @couldthishappen
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Hi,
Thanks for your interesting articles.
I read a piece you wrote on the slowing of the Earth’s rotation. I was searching for this information because I was interested in the possibility of the Earth’s rotation being much faster when dinosaurs were around. The .002 seconds per century that seems to be the standard only makes a day about 1.28 hours shorter 230 million year ago. That’s not enough for what I was curious about. If instead of 24 hours (or 22.72) when dinosaurs were around it had been say around 2 to 3 hours. The inertial force at the equator (centrifugal force) would counteract a substantial amount of the gravitational pull, reducing the effective weight of a dinosaur to around 1/2 to 3/4 of their weight by contemporary estimates.
The reduced effective weight would have the effect of making large dinosaurs more practical. The large prehistoric birds we have fossils of would be better able to fly.
The only large animals that exist now are whales and other ocean creatures where gravity is not a problem for them unless they are not in water.
A large slowing of the Earth’t rotation could have been caused by a the same asteroid or comet credited with causing the demise of dinosaurs. The idea would predict a number of things.
I suppose the idea has been examined before. I thought you might know something about this possibility from all the things you research.
I came up with the idea one evening when I was feeling particularly tired and thought humans must not have evolved in a place with this much gravity–but I guess we probably did.
Doug
Hey Joelle,
it was very nice meeting you yesterday evening. I look forward to read your articles! When you are around in South Germany, let me know! You have my email now…
Felix
Hi Felix!
Great meeting you and thanks for checking out the site. I hope you enjoy your travels and I’ll see you sometime in Germany!