A geoscientist explains what would happen if the Earth suddenly stopped spinning

• At its equator, the Earth is spinning at about 1,040 mph. But what if it stopped suddenly?

• You could and everything else go flying at hundreds of miles an hour, unless you are at the poles.

• The Earth’s rotation is actually slowing down at an estimated rate of 2.3 milliseconds every century.

“Stop the world, I want to know.” This exasperated phrase has been around since the 1950s, used in both classical and modern music.

But if the world stopped spinning, the consequences would be less of a romantic musical and more of an apocalyptic horror film.

What if the Earth suddenly stopped?

Imagine you are walking down a sunny beach somewhere along the equator. The Earth below you is spinning east at 1,040 miles per hour (1,674 kilometers per hour).

But since you, the sand, and everything else in your general vicinity are moving at the same speed, your stroll feels slow and leisurely.

Then the world stops about you, and you give up. Instead, you will get thrown off.

Thanks to that Newton’s first law At inertia, you initially fly east at about 1,040 miles per hour. No matter where you land, whether it’s sea or land, the force of the impact will likely kill you.

“Water would also feel this sudden acceleration,” said Joseph Levy, associate professor of Earth and environmental geosciences at Colgate University. So you would probably see the ocean flowing around a little while before the impact.

Trees and buildings would not be safe either, despite being rooted in the ground. “Deep materials are strong under compression but very weak under tension,” Levy said.

In other words, the nearby brick building can support hundreds of people because its floors and support beams buckle under their weight.

But the inertia moving the building to the east from the Earth’s sudden stop would be much stronger than the mortar that holds the bricks together, so the whole structure could be torn apart, Levy said.

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If it makes you feel better, your hypothetical cousin would probably live in Antarctica with bruises. “Near the poles, the axis of rotation is much smaller, so the rotational speed is much smaller,” Levy said.

But you would have to be very close – within 89.9 degrees latitude, Levy said, or about seven miles from the poles. At that distance, you could probably go at a walking pace.

But your friends in Denmark or Australia probably wouldn’t. Most places where people live are far enough from the poles that their residents would still fly on hundreds of thousands of hours.

What if the Earth gradually stopped spinning?

“In natural systems, nothing really comes to a stop immediately,” Levy said.

So what happens if the Earth slows down over days or weeks?

A gradual slowdown might keep you from paying attention to the sky, but when it stopped, you’d still be in a lot of trouble.

“During the year as the Earth orbits the sun, half of the planet would be at night and half in full light, but the half would be constantly changing throughout the year,” Levy said.

Instead of 12 hours, a “day” could last six months. The sun roasts crops nearby and evaporates a lot of water on your half of the globe, Levy said.

The night six months later probably wouldn’t be much better. Lack of light and heat would likely kill many remaining plants and cause the water to freeze into ice sheets.

Higher latitudes might be safer, because the sunlight wouldn’t be too intense near the poles, Levy said. But you would have to get used to a nomadic lifestyle, forever chasing daylight around the globe.

You may also have to deal with some unexpected weather.

On a spinning Earth, most of the sun’s radiation hits the planet’s equator. “In general, warm air rises over the equator, and falls over the poles after cooling,” Levy said. Ocean currents follow a similar up-down cycle.

But when only half the planet receives intense light for months on end, the planet experiences a second lateral temperature gradient, making the weather twice as complicated to predict.

“Winds across the terminal – the shadow line – would bring cold air back from the night side, where it would warm and rise during the day,” Levy said.

Could the world ever stop spinning?

Don’t worry, but the Earth’s rotation is slowing down thanks to a process called tidal braking.

Our moon’s gravity creates an infinitesimal drag on our planet’s spin, so every century, the Earth’s rotation slows down a little more 2.3 millisecondsaccording to NASA.

But it is unlikely that the moon would stop the Earth completely. “The Earth is much larger than the moon and has much more angular momentum as a result,” Levy said.

One way to significantly slow the rotation of the Earth is if humanity treated it as a massive source of energy. For example, we could theoretically use Earth as a flywheel systemstoring the kinetic energy from its spin to be applied to our energy needs.

“If you used the planet’s spinning momentum to meet all of man’s energy needs, it would still take something like 1 million years to slow the planet to a stop,” Levy said.

It is almost impossible for any object in space to stop the rotation of the Earth before that. “Earth’s angular momentum is too great for anything short of a total cataclysm to slow it down,” Levy said.

So the world won’t be stopping you from quitting anytime soon – and that’s probably a good thing.

Read the original article on Business Insider