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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