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Amaze Lab
  • 6/25/2025
Earth, like most planets out in the cosmos, famously spins on an axis, but what if it didn’t? What if one day, instead of twirling at 1,040 Miles per hour it just suddenly stopped, coming to a halt all at once?

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Transcript
00:00Earth, like most planets out in the cosmos, famously spins on an axis, but what if it didn't?
00:09What if one day, instead of twirling at 1,040 miles per hour, it just suddenly stopped,
00:14coming to a halt all at once? Well, geoscientists tell Business Insider,
00:18the first thing that would happen is that you and literally anything that isn't bolted to the
00:22ground would go flying eastward at around 1,000 miles per hour. That's because of inertia,
00:27or Newton's Law that outlines how things in motion tend to stay in motion. And since we are
00:31all currently moving with the Earth at 1,040 miles per hour, we would remain moving at that speed,
00:36even if our planet suddenly stopped doing the same. That jarring event would likely kill every
00:41living creature on the planet. But if something did survive that, they likely wouldn't survive
00:46what happens next. Geoscientist Joseph Levy of Colgate University says,
00:51water too would feel this sudden acceleration, meaning giant waves of water ripped from the
00:55ocean would also be moving over land at intense speeds, knocking over any buildings or trees
01:00that happened to survive the initial catastrophic event. So would anywhere be safe? According to
01:05Levy, the safest places would be near the planet's poles, where its rotational speed is much slower.
01:10Luckily, that's unlikely to happen. And Earth's slowing spin due to tidal breaking from the moon
01:14isn't expected to happen for billions of years.

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