Stops rotating around its axis, in a period of 5 or less seconds from full rotational velocity to 0 rotational velocity, that is. Disregarding the negligible additive or subtractive velocity of walking or driving. Would I simply travel at 1/2mv^2 until I inevitably contacted a solid surface? Where m=my body weight and v=velocity of the rotation of the Earth. Is my potential energy right now a direct function of Earth’s rotational velocity? What of anchored structures. Surely most, if not all, would become unrooted. Would an unrooted building travel more slowly because its point of anchor absorbed most of the force of velocity before becoming free? What if I was on an aircraft? Would it be o.k. to land once every object had eventually lost its velocity? Assuming a safe stretch of suitable land could be found. What would be the effects of living on a non-rotating Earth. The earth still rotates around the sun, the Moon around the Earth, etc. Obviously, a portion of the Earth would never see sunlight and vice versa. Would there be any meteorological anomolies not due to continouls exposure to, or absence of, sunlight?
Cecil has partially answered your question here
As for your main question, I would hazard a guess that once the earth stopped spinning you would contine to move at a tangent to the Earth. However, seeing as gravity is still in effect as before I would imagine you would probably fall over and roll several feet before coming to a stop rather than go flying off into space.
I have no idea what he means by “no such thing as centrifugal force”, but it obviously answers your question.
[sub]Recognition given to mittu’s link.[/sub]
Here is a nice little explanation of why centrifugal force isn’t real:
The above was taken from this webpage
1/2mv^2 has nothing to do with it. That’s Kinetic Energy.
Your tangential velocity due to rotation is roughly 1000 mph if you’re at the equator, and zero if you’re at the poles, and varies between those two points at the cosine of the latitude. For North America or Europe, figure some 600-700 mph. That’s based on V=d/t for d = Earth’s circumference at the equater & t = 24 hours
If the rotation went to zero in 5 seconds, you’d be travelling at 700 mph relative to your surroundings. Imagine falling off your motorcycle at 700 mph and you get an idea of what happens next.
You’re right that buildings and trees and such are attached to the ground, but given the magnitude of the acceleration imparted, only a tiny fraction of that force would be consumed ripping the buildings off the foundations and uprooting trees. All the rest of the energy would be dissipated as the objects, traveling at 650-ish mph over the ground, rolled themselves into large balls of wreckage within a quarter mile or so.
Now you implicitly assumed the solid part of the earth is rigid enough to hold together without deformation when the rotation magically stops. In reality, the forces we’re talking about are enough to shear rock, so whole mountains would go sliding eastward at a (WAG)couple hundred miles per hour, at least for awhile. It would be very noisy and chaotic for a few minutes until everything quits thrashing around. I almost said “until the dust settles”, but I bet that’d take a century or so …
ANother fun discussion is what happens to the oceans. If we assume the water keeps moving like regular water & only the solid earth stops rotating, well tehn you’re talking about tsunamis that make last December look like a kid splashing in a puddle. Imagine the Mississippi river suddely going sideways to the East at 700-ish mph, and the entire Mid-Atlantic wanting to go ashore in Spain & France. Surf’s like TOTALLY UP duuude.
As to airplanes and atmosphere, that depends on what you want to assume. The atmosphere, other than minor effects such as wind, normally rotates with the earth. When the earth stops, do you assume the atmosphere keeps going, or stops within 5 seconds too?
If the latter, any airplane will suddenly find itself encountering a 700 mph wind gust from the East. I fly jets for a living, and I know of no airplane that has the dynamic speed range & strength to survive that unscathed.
If you assume the atmosphere does NOT stop suddenly, then the ground will experience West winds going from zero to 700 mph in 5 seconds. That’ll make everything else happening even more fun. The airplanes will suddenly notice the world going by at insane speeds but will otherwise be unscathed … for the moment. The turbulence caused by 700 mph winds over the rough ground will rapidly roil the sky into a madly swirling mess that’ll overstress and destroy anything that flies.
If we imagine somebody survives the turbulence, the problem’s not over yet.
Eventually (maybe a week later), the atmosphere will have slowed to match the non-rotation and airplanes could safely land again. In the interim, the winds across the ground will be slowly declining from 700 mph towards zero. The only hope for an airplane is to head towards the Poles, where the windspeed might get down to survivable as you got within 10 degrees of a Pole. But there’s nowhere to land up (or down) there, so they’re still screwed. Not to mention that very few airplanes airborne at any given moment have enough fuel on board to reach the nearest Pole.
All in all, I think yuo’ve come up with a pretty convincing Doomsday scenario. If there we more than 5,000 humans alive worldwide 10 minutes later I’d be amazed.
This question has been dealt with elsewhere on the web, perhaps most reliably on NASA’s website The general concensus of opinion seems to be that if the Earth suddenly stopped spinning the 1100 m.p.h. winds would wipe the surface clean of anything man-made and then, as stated by LSLGuy, be treated to a thorough wipe down by the oceans and seas.
This scenario reminds me of an Eddie Izzard joke about God’s Etch-a-Sketch end of the world where he simply wipes it clean to start again when he realises it is all going wrong.
Doing a little more math, a stop from 700 mph to zero in 5 seconds is only roughly 6-1/2 Gs. If you were belted into an aircraft-quality seat bolted to a well-mounted slab of concrete, you’d easily survive the stop with no injuries, at least if the load was back to front, front to back or head to toe. The danger then would be all the debris coming at you that wasn’t so well-attached, not to mention the wind unless the atmosphere magically stopped too.
If we assume the energy isn’t magically siphoned off to nowhere, but is instead sent to where all disorganized energy goes, namely into heat, I wonder how much we’re talking about. I’m not motivated enough to figure out the total rotational energy and run the thermo calcs needed.
Anyone want to grab that ball and run with it? Assume we pump all the rotatinal KE into heat in the top 10 feet of the ground surface, how hot does it get? Molten I’d bet. What if we just let each integral chunk absorb its own heat of rotation? That’d add more at the surface than in the depths, and more at the equator than the Poles. I’m WAGging the rise’d be significant, but not enough to cook everything.
You have to define what you mean by “the Earth” stopping its rotation in just five seconds. Everyting we consider Earth, including the whole crust, dirt, mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, just magically came to a stop? How about anything permanently attached, like buildings and trees? If all those attached things are magically stopping as well, your only hope would be to have your back up against a West-facing wall when it started, with no other loose debris for a few hundred yards in front of you. Anything less, and you’re toast.
But it’s hard to even make sense of the question - let’s say that the Earth’s crust stopped. Does that include the mountains? Anything that you say stops in your little scenario has to be just an arbitrary choice.
It might make it more interesting to ask what would happen if the Earth’s solid crust came to a stop within a couple of weeks.
Well, if you want to talk heat, the side now permanently facing the sun would get gradually toastier.
As we used to say back at Evil Scientist College, “if you’re going to destroy all life, there’s no point in going for halfway measures.”
So why just stop the rotation of the Earth around its axis? The real fun is stopping the Earth’s rotation around the sun. You want inertial forces? We’re talking 50,000 kph. And none of this “one size fits all” destruction. If it’s noon or midnight local time on the Day the Earth Stands Still, you’ll experience the same lateral effect as previously described - except faster. If it’s 6:00 am, you’ll enjoy the amusing sensation of being crushed into the ground at 50,000 kph. But the most fun will be for those at 6:00 pm - they’ll get flung straight upwards at the same speed. Think of the view!
And if you want to have a group of people who could be expected to survive it for at least a little while to tell the story, then write it from the point of view of the inhabitants of the South Pole Base. Almost no acceleration, minimal atmosphere effects (at least immediately) and well dug in, with supplies for some time on hand. Of course, replenishment of those supplies could be a problem …
Just mentioning the seas sloshing like a tidal wave is an insane level of understatement. A tidal wave is basically a ripple in the ocean. The infamous super tsunami of history would be big ripples. This is entire oceans washing across the continents at the speed of sound!
Consider Australia. It has the entire Indian Ocean at its west. Most of that is deeper than the tallest geographic feature in Australia. A significant percentage of the water moving eastward is going to make it all the way across Australia, without rebounding. It’s just going to join the pacific as it rides up over the Andes mountains, and foams on down into the Amazon Basin, and the Pampas, in about a day after the big stop. Then the remaining water is going to slosh back, westward, and scour Australia again, if any hard rock surface survives, which is extremely doubtful.
I cannot decide if the number of sloshes is greater than the number of times that the Pacific will simply encircle the world. The Rockies and Andes are big dikes, for at least the first two times around. But not enough to absorb the impact of the Pacific Ocean. There is no place for this fifteen thousand foot flood tide to recede to. It will come on through the gaps, as the Mountains get scoured down to their nubs, and the great flood of salt water will wash over the great plains, and out through the Gulf of Mexico. About that time, the Atlantic Ocean will be coming home. The Gulf of Mexico alone is enough to eliminate Florida as a geographic feature, it’s only 168 feet high at “Mount Dora.” The former Isthmus of Panama won’t even be an island chain, after the second or third “Slosh.”
And that all takes place below the winds, previously mentioned.
The Tibetan Plateau, and the Gobi desert, parts of western China, and the center of northern Asia won’t be hit by the huge slosh of the oceans, or the rebound. Every other mid latitude place on Earth is too close to the ocean for any recognizable geographic feature to survive. The winds will make those areas uninhabitable, of course, but the actual mountains of the Himalayans might survive. Greenland, in the places far from the coast might not get scoured. Of course, that’s mostly ice. (Does ice count as part of the solid earth?) The northern tips of the Eurasian land mass will probably not be scoured down to rock, either. Northern Canada fares less well, given the size and placement of Hudson’s bay, and all the coastal water.
The magic stop is absurd, and its consequences far more extensive than anything since the Mars sized impactor vaporized half the crust of the planet in the first billion years or so.
Tris
No side would permanently be facing the sun, instead, the vast majority of the surface would operate on a 6-months of light, 6-months of dark basis.
This scenario has been postulated by H.G. Wells, in The Man Who Could Work Miracles:
I’m not sure how accurate “dozens of miles a minute” is, but it’s a fair bet that the “incontinently” bit is right on the money. 
Hey, thanks for the education. Regarding the atmosphere, or wind: It would indeed travel very fast, but only relative to the now stopped Earth, correct? It shouldn’t affect an aloft aircraft because said aircraft does not enjoy the Earth’s rotational potential energy, correct? Does not the atmosphere rotate independently of the Earth? Do we not feel wind only because the Earth is rotating differentially to the atmosphere? If this is true, would not the arrest of Earth’s rotation have little effect on the atmosphere and elements contained therin? Would not the resulting winds only be relative to objects in contact with the Earth? Objects that share the Earth’s rotational energy.
I’m a little perplexed by the use of the term “magical stop.” (used a few times). How is this magical? Nothing in science or physics is absolute. The sun will one day lose all of its radiant energy. Whatever provides impetus for Earth’s rotation (what? gravo-magnetic interactions with other celestial bodies?) could someday lose their influence and magnitude. Perhaps it would require magic for a 5-second stop, because no force that could stop Earth’s rotation that quickly is known to exist. But there is a possibility that such a force could exist. My theoretic model is based on physics that, while not known to exist, could exist. At one point in history, many scoffed at airplane design and wondered how you could magically keep weight aloft for an extended period.
The Earth’s crust, mantle, core and surface make up the sphere we call Earth, correct? So a complete arrest of rotation would involve all simultaneously, as I envision it. In my estimation, all of the above elements of Earth would stop rotating simultaneously and the superficial elements (bodies of water, trees, houses, mountains, anything extending above the surface of the sphere) would gain kinetic energy relative to the Earth’s one-time rotational energy.
I am no physics major. I only needed basics physics (atomic spectrum, thermodynamics, calorimetry, astronomy, etc.) to graduate. Thusly, I am not speaking with absolute authority (obviously); that is why most of my statements are questions. Astronomy interested me the most, that is why I asked the question in the OP. Astronomy constitutes, largely, untestable hypotheses and theories derived, mostly, from observations. Thusly I envision a scenario such as in the OP as likely, rather than probable.
Gah. Replace “likely” in the last line of the above post with “possible.”
There is no “impetus” that causes the earth to rotate. The rotation is a result of angular momentum accumulated during its formation, and inertia keeps it right on going.
The only physical method I can think of that would cause an abrupt stop would be a glancing collision with another planet in a counter-rotational direction. If you were on the opposite side of the planet from the collision, your initial experience probably would resemble the effects described in this thread – water & air would definitely continue moving when the rock stopped beneath it.
But those effects would be quicky be overwhelmed by the effects of the collision, like the partial melting of the planet, alteration of its orbit, etc …
Newton’s first law of motion is a little hard to get around – and a scenario in which another object or force acted upon the Earth in such a way as to arrest its rotation instantaneously without inducing other, more catastrophic, effects, is so remote from our observation and experience of physics that we might as well put it under the “magic” column. We can scarcely imagine anything that would effect such an event, in practical terms.
Your analogy of the physics of flight is poor, since men have always had the opportunity to observe natural flight, and some men have always intuited the possibility of technological flight, scoffers aside. When it comes to bringing the Earth to a rapid stand-still, it’s not a question of working of the fine points of how it is managed, as with flight. It would require new laws of physics which are entirely novel and have hitherto been totally unsuspected.
Well, no. The atmosphere rotates with the earth, and winds are essentially flow between areas of different pressure (mostly caused by differences in solar heating). The “still atmosphere, moving earth” notion doesn’t work at all - among many other problems, winds would under that model tend to be from the east, whereas prevailing winds are mostly westerly.
The real fun will be when we go flying into the sun.