Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if the Earth stopped spinning right now? For you, it would be like being in a car at 1600km/h and stopping to zero. Of course, this means the end for everything alive on Earth. But, believe it or not, it gets even worse than that, as this video explains.
The bullet points:
— Your body would start flying east like a discombobulated mass of muscle and bone at an incredible speed — at 465m per second if you are near the equator.
— Since Earth rotation is slower near the equators, people very near the poles may survive. But only at first.
— People on planes may initially survive the first few seconds.
— Anyone or anything that survived would be killed by the gigantic storms that would ensue right after the stop point.
— The speed of the wind — faster than the blast of an atomic bomb — would be so high that it would instantly start fires all around the planet.
— The wind would also cause unprecedented erosion to anything actually part of Earth, like mountains.
— The oceans would rise as gigantic tsunamis, and all water would move towards the poles, as shown in this computer simulation:
— The spinning iron core in the center of the Earth would stop too, stopping the generation of our planet protective magnetic field. The Sun radioactive rays would automatically kill anything left.
— On top of that, half of the Earth would be constantly exposed to the Sun, rising temperatures to unlivable levels. On the other half, Earth would freeze.
Finally, life on Earth wouldn’t be able to recover from this. Ever.