I've listened to quite a long section of that, but apart from the fact that there appears to be some 12 degree movement of the Earth's axis at around 84 million years ago, I'm afraid I really can't take that in!! I hope Prof Lewis Dartnell will be along shortly with a simple English version for the interested non-specialist!
What did you make of it?
Fascinating stuff, I think. We tend to think of the Earth as being stable, predictable in all its motions, but the more we discover, the more we find that this is not really true. I worked on the rotation of the Earth long back when I was younger, and our conclusions were that the Earth's spin has always been somewhat variable due to internal tectonic activity (Earth was spinning faster than usual in 2020 for instance). This new research supports a significant disturbance to Earth's axis of rotation 84 million years ago, the researchers suggest, due to an abnormal subduction of the Pacific plate resulting in a significant redistribution of Earth's internal mass, knocking our spinning top off balance. Over a period of several million years, the internal mass would tend to settle back into an even distribution again, and the Earth gradually righted itself once more.
It will be interesting to see if this finding kicks off new discoveries relating to how this could have affected life on Earth, disturbing the patterns of insolation with whatever consequences for the climate and biogeography of the late Cretaceous.
There is a more accessible overview of it here :
https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-tipped-over-84-million-years-ago-study-2021-6?r=US&IR=T
