Science News, February 27th, 1993
Without the moon, life on Earth would likely face the same kinds of wild fluctuations in climate that Mars has apparently experienced through the eons. Its spin axis no longer maintained by the moon at an angle of 23.5 degrees, Earth could drastically change its tilt in just a few million years, sometimes dipping enough to bring more sunlight to polar regions than to equatorial zones. These startling conclusions arise out of new calculations revealing that the chaotic wobbles of a planet's orbit around the sun can have a strong influence on the angle at which the planet's spin axis is tilted ...
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