“Stop the world, I want to get off.” This offensive expression has been around since the 1950s and is used in both classical and contemporary music. But if the world really stopped spinning, the results would belong more in an apocalyptic horror movie than a romantic musical. Imagine walking on a sunny beach somewhere along the equator. The earth below you is spinning eastward at 1,040 miles per hour (1,674 kilometers per hour).

What if the Earth suddenly stopped?

But because you, the sand, and everything around you are moving at the same speed, your walk appears slow and unhurried. Then the world stops at your feet and you go out. More precisely, you will be dropped. Due to Newton’s first law of inertia, you are initially flying east at about 1040 miles per hour. No matter where you land, whether ocean or land, the force of the impact will likely kill you.

“Water will also feel this sudden acceleration,” said Joseph Levy, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at Colgate University. So you’ll likely see ocean splashing around before impact.

Trees and buildings will also not be safe, even if their roots are connected to the ground. “Earth materials are strong in compression but very weak in tension,” Levy said. In other words, this nearby brick building could house hundreds of people as its floor and support beams collapsed under their own weight.

But the inertia pushing the building eastward from Earth’s sudden stop would be much stronger than the mortar holding the bricks together, so the entire structure could crumble, Levy said.

If it makes you feel any better, your hypothetical cousin in Antarctica would probably survive with a few bruises. “Near the poles the spin axis is much smaller, so the spin rate is much lower,” Levy said.

But you need to be very close, within 89.9 degrees latitude, or about seven miles from the poles, Levy said. At this distance you’re probably stumbling forward at walking pace. But your friends in Denmark or Australia probably won’t make it. Many of the places where people live are so far from the poles that their inhabitants still fly at hundreds of miles per hour.

What if the Earth gradually stopped rotating?

“Nothing in natural systems stops overnight,” Levy said.

What if the Earth slows down for days or weeks? Gradual deceleration may keep you from tilting skyward, but you’ll still be in big trouble when it stops.

“Over the course of a year, as the Earth orbits the sun, half of the planet will be fully illuminated at midnight, but the other half will be constantly changing throughout the year,” Levy said.

A “day” can last half a year instead of 12 hours. Levy added that constant sun would fry nearby crops and evaporate most of the water in your half of the world. The next six months’ night probably won’t be much better. The lack of light and heat will likely kill most of the remaining plants and turn the water into sheets of ice.

Levy said higher latitudes may be safer because sunlight won’t be as intense near the poles. But you’ll have to get used to a nomadic lifestyle, constantly chasing daylight around the world.

You may also have to deal with unexpected weather conditions. On a rotating Earth, most solar radiation falls on the planet’s equator. “Generally speaking, hot air rises above the equator and descends over the poles after cooling,” Levy said. said. Ocean currents follow a similar cycle of ups and downs.

But when only half the planet receives intense sunlight for several months, the planet experiences a second lateral temperature shift that makes weather forecasting doubly difficult.

“Winds will move over the terminator (shadow line), bringing in cold air from the night side, while on the day side it will warm up and rise,” Levy added.

Will the world ever stop turning?

Don’t panic, but the Earth’s rotation is slowing down through a process called tidal slowing. Our moon’s gravity creates very little drag on our planet’s rotation, so Earth slows down by an additional 2.3 milliseconds per century of rotation, according to NASA.

However, it seems unlikely that the Moon will completely stop the Earth. “The Earth is much larger than the Moon and as a result has a much greater angular momentum,” Levy said.

One way to significantly slow down the Earth’s rotation would be for humanity to view it as a giant source of energy. For example, we could theoretically use the Earth as a flywheel system that stores kinetic energy from its rotation to meet our energy needs.

“If you use the planet’s rotational momentum to meet all of humanity’s energy needs, it would still take about 1 million years to slow the planet to a halt,” Levy said.

It is almost impossible for any object in space to stop the Earth’s rotation any sooner. “The angular momentum of the Earth is too great for anything short of a complete catastrophe to slow it down,” Levy said.

So the world isn’t stopping you from getting out any time soon, and that’s probably a good thing.