What happens if the planet stops spinning

Login or Register Customer Service. RISE —. PHASE —. Tonight's Sky — Change location. US state, Canadian province, or country. Tonight's Sky — Select location. Tonight's Sky — Enter coordinates. UTC Offset:. Picture of the Day Image Galleries. Watch : Mining the Moon for rocket fuel. Queen guitarist Brian May and David Eicher launch new astronomy book. Last chance to join our Costa Rica Star Party! Learn about the Moon in a great new book New book chronicles the space program.

Dave's Universe Year of Pluto. Groups Why Join? Astronomy Day. The Complete Star Atlas. In the film The Day the Earth Stood Still , an extraterrestrial named Klaatu and his robot companion Gort stop nearly all of the electronics on Earth simultaneously, using their advanced alien technology.

Cars, factories, television sets and more all cease to work, and the planet settles into an eerie pause. Earth's equatorial bulge shapes the planet's physics. Henson Crater: Lunar impact site named for Arctic explorer. When north goes south: Is Earth's magnetic field flipping?

Ask Astro : How did Earth's gravity capture then lose a year-old rocket booster? Anything on land that was not attached to bedrock, would go flying.

That would mean, rocks, soil, trees, buildings, animals, people would be swept away. This would also include the oceans, which would be forced sideways, at terrifying speed. Tsunamis would form.. The Earth may stop suddenly, but the atmosphere would continue to spin, which would cause winds and storms travelling at the speed of an atomic blast.

If anyone happens to survive those catastrophes, things are about to get a little more interesting. If the earth stops spinning, the bulge would flatten, and the water would spread out towards each pole, where gravity is strongest, filling up the Arctic and southern ocean. That would leave this mega continent, wrapped around the equator of the planet. Right, so on the new, still Earth, one day would cease being 24 hours long.

Billions of years ago, the solar system was born out of a nebula, which is a giant cloud of gas and dust. The nebula first formed a star, and gravity caused the star to move in a circular orbit.

The nebula continued forming other space objects, including the sun, the Earth, and other planets; as it did so, the sun and planets began to rotate, too. As the sun and planets became more compact, they began to spin even faster.

As scientists have established, the Earth is not going to stop spinning in our lifetimes, or for billions of years.

According to BBC Science Focus Magazine , if planet Earth suddenly stopped spinning for example, if it arrived at a hard stop over the course of 60 seconds , things like the atmosphere and oceans would continue spinning, while everything else would be wiped out.