What If the Earth Stopped Spinning?

Let's get our admittedly far fetched assumptions out on the table. First, let's assume that the Earth stopped spinning gradually, as a sudden deceleration would mean disaster, and second, will suppose that Earth's ecosystems have survived the transition mostly intact. So what does this new world look like? For starters? Earth would now take a whole year to do what it pulls off in a day cycle from night to day and back.

Cities would spend half the year in darkness and half the year in full sunlight, just like the North and South Poles do to day. And like the Poles, every region would still experience different seasons, but the temperature swings from seasoned season would be much greater for areas along the equator. An equatorial region would spend infernally hot months very close to the Sun, while that area's global counterpart would spend dark, frigid months very far away from it.

That's trouble for the plants and animals that have adapted to the climate of a region, and consequently for the people living there as well. The polar regions would remain relatively stable, except for the part where they would be deep under water. In fact, the boundaries between ocean and land on a spin free Earth would look nothing like they do today. Because the Earth rotates, centrifugal force causes the planet to bulge along the equator. No rotation, no bulge.

Without that bulge, all of the extra water held in place along the equator would go rushing back toward the poles. Ez We, a company that develops geography focused technology, modeled the world's land and oceans after its equatorial bulge subsided and found that the Earth would have a band of land, one giant supercontinent that circles the equator and separates two massive oceans to the north and the south, and Earth's

magnetic field might go away too. While we're not entirely sure how that magnetic field is generated, the leading theory states that it's the result of Earth's inter core rotating slightly faster than its outer core. Yep, that's two different rotations in one planet. Should both of them stop, the mechanism behind Earth's magnetic field may as well, leaving us exposed to harmful solar winds and other radiation from space.

So where would that leave us? We humans are an adaptable species with powerful technology at our disposal, but survival in this new environment would be a challenge. But sure, we could try to light our homes in the darkness and heat and cool them at great cost during wild temperature swings, but not everything would be under our control. Would crops survive the extremes of this new world? Could any plants? If not, the entire food chain would be

in danger. Perhaps we could find new crops or modify existing ones to tolerate this new environment, or maybe we would become dependent on perennials that can survive harsh winters and return with warm weather. You have to admit, it doesn't feel like you're spinning around the center of the Earth at hundreds of miles an hour, So we should probably cut our scientific forebears some slack for assuming that Earth was stationary and that the Sun rotated around it.

Thanks to a number of mathematicians and astronomers over the centuries, we now know that the Earth spins on its axis as it revolves around the Sun. But why does our planet spin in the first place. Remember Newton's first law of motion. It states that an object remains in whatever state of motions in unless another force acts upon it. You could say that the Earth is rotating because it's

been doing that for as long as it's existed. Before there were planets in our Solar system, there was a spinning, nebulous cloud of dust with our Sun at the center. Over time, these dust particles collided into one another and began to stick, forming larger and larger rocks and ultimately planets through a process known as accretion. But remember the cloud of dust or accretion disk, was rotating from the start.

As the particles that formed the Earth began to stick together, that momentum was conserved, causing the growing planet to spin faster and faster, much the way that a figure skater does when they pull their arms in towards their body. By the time the Earth had formed, it had all of the angular momentum it would need to keep spinning

to this very day. And now that we know a little bit about how planets and solar systems form, it's probably not surprising that not only does our planet spin, but all of them do, though not always in the same direction. Since stars developed from rotating solar nebula, they spin too, But how fast. Measuring the straight line speed of, say a car, is a fairly simple and reliable process. Measuring the speed of a rotating object like the Earth

is slightly more complicated. After all, if you stand at one of the poles, you'll spin right along with the rest of the Earth, but you'll be stationary with respect to its center. A stand on the equator, though, and you'll have a linear speed of one thousand and thirty six miles an hour. That's one thousand, six hundred and sixty seven kilometers per hour. That's faster than the speed of sound and one of the reasons that we tend to launch rockets towards the east. So is there anything

slowing the Earth's rotation down? Well, sure, but the forces changing the speed of the Earth's rotation make an extremely small impact. The tides, which are caused by the gravitational forces between the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon produce tidal friction as they interact with the Earth. That drag adds about two point three milliseconds toward day every century. Weather systems can change the Earth's rotation too, with winds

applying a breaking force to the planet's surface. Finally, earthquakes can mess with the length of a day by actually redistributing the Earth's mass. The two thousand eleven earthquake that struck Japan actually accelerated the Earth's spin because it shifted the mass towards the equator and shortened the day by one point eight microseconds. So the next time you complain about the day being too long or too short, don't despair. It's changing all the time. Today's episode was written by

John and Attabury and produced by Tyler clang Or. More on this and lots of other topics that you may or may not find art stopping visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio or more podcasts. My Heart Radio visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.