If the earth would suddenly stop spinning, what would happen to you if: a) you were standing on the equator or
b) you were exactly on one of the poles?
Would you fly off the earth at the equator and cork-screw into the ground at the poles? Please help I’m having nightmares.
If you were standing at the equator, you’d fly due west at approximately 1040 miles/hour. As you move toward one of the poles, that speed would decrease, until it becomes zero at the pole.
:smack: Due east, not west.
More importantly, the heat generated would probably melt the planet.
If only the core were to stop spinning, they’d probably make awful sci-fi movies about it.
Seems to me, if the Earth stopped spinning, barring some outlandish anomoly, you would slow/stop at the same rate. The question should be, what would happen to the planet and all inhabitants if the planet continued it’s orbit, but ceased rotating.
Just a thought to keep everyone typing out there.
Why would the heat melt the planet?
where would this heat come from?
Do you mean not rotating in reference to the sun or not rotating at all?
The kinetic energy of the Earth’s roation; when an object stops, its kinetic energy has to go somewhere; in most cases of objects stopping, it is converted into heat.
If you were standing at one of the poles, it would be equivalent to standing at the center of a table that’s rotating every 24 hours, and the table suddenly stopped. I doubt you’d notice.
That’s a first-pass approximation. Then you get into the secondary effects. What would happen to the crust when all this energy was dissipated at lower lattitudes? I don’t know. Eventually, you would be lifted upwards by a few miles, because the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation causes the equator to bulge out, and as the earth became more spherical, the poles would go outwards. If this were going to happen, I’d sure want to be at a pole.
Well. The kinetic energy in the Earth’s rotation is about 0.3MR[sup]2[/sup]w[sup]2[/sup], where M is the mass, R is the radius, and w is the frequency of rotation. The coefficient 0.3 is 1/2 *3/5, where the 1/2 is in the kinetic energy formula and the 3/5 is what one gets for a sphere with uniform mass distribution. That’s not right, of course, but it’s good enough for government work. And it means that the kinetic energy in the Earth’s spinning is roughly speaking 10[sup]28[/sup] Joules.
If all that energy were turned to heat, the change in temperature would be of the order c M dT, where c is the specific heat and dT is the change in temperature. This also is only approximate, but hey, we’re all adults here and we can handle it. I don’t know what the specific heat of the Earth is, but if it were made of water (snicker), it would take 4000 J to heat one kilogram by one Kelvin. Then the change in temperature, assuming the Earth were entirely made of water, and that all the energy of spinning were dumped into heat, would be about half a Kelvin. Assuming I’ve not made any algebra mistakes, as this value seems ridiculously low.
At any rate, even if I’m off by a couple of orders of magnitude, I don’t think this would melt the Earth… Not, of course, that you won’t have all sorts of other problems. 
Conservaton of angular momentum. The rotating earth is a battery storing an absolutely astounding amount of energy. Stop the earth, and that energy has to go somewhere. Things will get toasty warm. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the energy is enough to heat the entire earth up by hundreds of degrees. So we wouldn’t be around to enjoy our new non-rotation.
What force is being applied to stop the earth rotating?
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I’m afraid the question isn’t specific enough… we would have to know what force has caused the rotation to stop (thanks to kniz), we would have to konw if you meaned stopped all at once, or slowed then stopped, and if so, what rate did it slow at?
if it stopped all at once, i would think that the earths gravity would be enough to keep you from flying in to space, though i don’t think the tectonic (sp?) plates would be able to handle the sudden stress, and the result would be worldwide earthquakes measuring close to or at 10 on the Richter Scale, which would cause massive super volcanoes, then the fallout out would be similar to nuclear winter, all life dies, so on and so forth.
on the other hand, if it was a steady slowing of velocity, to reach an ultimate stop… i think that would be pretty nasty too, though maybe not in the same way… days and nights would get much much longer, i imagine it may change the velocity that the earth travels around the sun, causing years to get longer, and it may change the axis that the earth rotates on, causing seasons to change, the poles would melt, causing massive floods and tidal waves, all life dies, so on and so forth…
either way, the fact that the earth spins, on the precise axis it does, is one very key factor to human evolution, as life would not have been possible without it.
and we haven’t even mentioned the effect this would have on the moon, another key element to life on earth
The moon is tidally locked with the earth but the earth is not tidally locked to the moon so the moon would not be affected if the earth stopped turning, nor would it affect the orbit of the earth around the sun.
that depends actually, when the velocity changed would it not affect earths gravity? if so then i think it would affect the moon… i could be wrong though, sometimes it is hard to wrap your head around such calculations
As Sam mentioned, there’s conservation of angular momentum to deal with. The moon is not tidally locked to the earth, but it tidally interacts with the earth nevertheless; of course the moon would be affected if the earth stopped turning!
then of course if you happened to have survived, and the planet survived, it would be a much different place… it would be forever daylight and summer on one side, and night time and winter on the other
The Master speaks.
The violent consequences to the Earth and everything on it of a sudden stop in its rotation has long been a subject of fascination for people who wish to argue against Biblical literalism.
Scripture says that the sun stood still over the Valley of Ajalon so that Joshua could fight a battle to its conclusion. At the Scopes trial Clarence Darrow argued that this actually meant that the earth had stopped spinning, and went on to say that the planet should have pretty well melted.
The problem is also addressed in H. G. Wells’ story The Man Who Could Work Miracles.
While I have no faith whatever in strict Bibilical literalism, it strikes me that this particular argument is misguided; if God chose to suspend the laws of physics in order to stop the earth, it seems He could as easily shield the world from its consequences.