Solved cryptogram
Earth's day is slowly growing longer, because the tides raised by the moon act as a brake.
Astronomy Facts, sourced to NASA.
What it means
The moon pulls the oceans into bulges, and the friction of that water dragging over the sea floor steals a little of the planet's rotational energy. The effect is tiny, on the order of a couple of milliseconds per century, but it accumulates. Fossil corals and layered sediments record daily and yearly growth bands, and they show that a day in the late Devonian ran to about twenty two hours.
The claim comes from NASA, and the page it comes from was read on 2026-08-27 to confirm it still says this.
This is not the kind of claim that goes out of date, which is why it was set as a puzzle rather than a fact with a shelf life.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 71 letters over 19 different ones, graded medium.
- SourceNASA
- CollectionAstronomy Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length71 letters, 19 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.