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If the Earth stopped spinning, the day, as well as the night, will last the whole year. Half of the planet half of the year would face the hotness of the Sun, while another half would face the coldness of space.
Life organisms could survive mainly in a thin gloaming zone between the heated and cold hemispheres. But this gloaming zone would gradually crawl around Earth over a year, as the planet did its yearly cycle around our Sun.
But let’s assume the oceans don’t freeze on the cold side of the planet or warm up a lot on the other side. And let’s see solely at centripetal force.
This force effectively thrust outwards for billions of years and has caused the Earth to be a bit fatter around the middle. As a result, Earth’s equatorial diameter is about 21.4 kilometers more than the diameter of our planet measured through the poles.
This protrusion in the solid planet took billions of years to expand slowly, but the liquid water of the hydrosphere is considerably more movable and rapidly reacts to forces. As a result, thanks to the spinning of our planet, the water at the equator has been pushed up about 8 kilometers higher than in the situation of the Earth having no spin!
Esrimade stunning visualization of what would happen if our planet would stop spinning.
So take away the rotation, and equatorial waters would move to poles. As a result, territories at high latitude in the northern hemisphere become engulfed. The areal size of the Arctic ocean would fast increase, incorporating the large flat and vast regions of Siberia and northern parts of North America.
Canada would be completely undersea. And approximately following the borderline of the modern-day United States and Canada will be underwater. In addition to Siberia, Greenland, Asia, and Europe will be undersea as well. But the Iberian Peninsula would mostly stay above water.
The world ocean would persist one system till the planet’s rotation lowered to the speed at which ocean separation would happen. As the result of the slowdown of the planet’s spin, the world ocean would be slowly divided into two disconnected polar oceans.
Finally, there would be a vast mega-continent covered continuously around the planet at the equator.
Astonishingly, the highest spot of this mega-continent dividing planet wouldn’t be the highest elevation on the whole globe. The highest altitude of the global range in the Colombian Andes would be approximately 12.3 kilometers. In contrast, the heights of the legendary equatorial volcanoes of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Chimborazo in Ecuador would be 12.8 and 13.6 kilometers, sequentially. Both volcanoes happen not to be positioned on the global divide line. The lowest point on the new planet dividing line, with an altitude of 2.8 kilometers, would be southwest Kiribati Island in the former of the western Pacific ocean.
The newly formed southern ocean would begin on the other side of the equatorial mega-continent south to the current-day Canberra.
The South Pole’s underwater basin is much bigger than the one nearby the North Pole. As a result of its more giant ‘bowl’ with a larger capacity, its sea level would be approximately 1.4 kilometers lower than the water level of the North polar ocean.
Hundreds of years ago, a day was just around 22 hours long, resulting from a planet rotating its axis faster than now. For billions of years, from the beginning of formation, the Earth’s rotation slows down. This process proceeds to the present day, and estimations suggest that the length of a day extends by around 1.8 milliseconds each century. The slowdown imperceptibly but unwaveringly alters the geometry of our planet and makes it dynamic. The effect of these dynamic changes is that our Earth is gradually shifting more and more like a sphere. Nevertheless, it will take billions of years ere our planet stops rotating.
To find out what would happen if the Earth rotated in the opposite direction, click here.
