What If The Earth Stopped Spinning?

As we go through the hustle and bustle of each day, engaging in one activity or the other to make ends meet, there’s one major event that we hardly ever notice—the rotation of our planet.

Planet Earth rotates at around 1,670 km per hour. But how does this affect our lives (if it ever does)? What would happen if the earth stopped spinning completely? Wouldn’t that mean woe to the inhabitants of the earth? Well, let’s see.

There’s just one word to describe the effect of the earth refusing to spin, and it’s CATASTROPHE. Like Maddie Moate from Earth Unplugged puts it, We and all that’s not attached to the planet would be thrown to one side. The oceans, too, would gain momentum. And, in a split second, they will spread nearly 28 kilometers inland in a giant tsunami.

Since they could not be stopped by anything, the winds would sweep around the earth and whip it up into a giant storm.

But what if the earth came to came to a gradual standstill?—If the stop isn’t sudden, and it happens slowly and, maybe, safely. If in the scenario that the earth stopped spinning on its axis, but still orbited the sun, a lot would change. A day would become a year-long, and the sun would no longer rise in the east, but it would rise in the west and set in the east. There would be six months of darkness and then six months of sunlight.

This would be more than enough to frustrate the hell out of the natural world. If we could survive six straight months without light, how do we show accelerated growth within the remaining six months of light. For all our sakes, the earth just needs to keep on spinning.