Viewed 1k times. Improve this question. X caliber. X caliber X caliber 67 5 5 bronze badges. Use things that you do know about to help you. Imagine, for instance, taking a ball and spinning it on a table, floor, or your finger.
The ball will stop moving after some time, due to forces acting upon it. Does the ball at this point then begin rotating in a reverse direction? What does it take for that to happen? And what about a heavier ball of the same size? Spin both at the same time, which stops first, and why? The OP has a valid, focused question. The source of the claim is not relevant. We know that tidal locking is a thing, an answer would explain why the rotation can't reverse.
It would not be easy to research an answer to this. We need to be more open to newbie questions. Show 11 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Anders Sandberg Anders Sandberg 9, 1 1 gold badge 20 20 silver badges 32 32 bronze badges. Add a comment. The headline though is The Earth won't start rotating backwards and The sun won't rise in the West Yes Mars and the other planets do move retrograde against the stars. Is a copy-and-paste combination of 1 and 3 Yes, the Earth's magnetic poles do sometimes "flip", and quite quickly on a Geological scale, taking only a few thousand years.
In short these are three unreliable sources. Please just forget. James K James K We don't all share the same God belief, and I think it distracts us from the scientific arguments. Whether you believe in God or not, I stand by the fact that It is absolutely impossible for the Earth to change direction unless willed to by God. If you believe in an all powerful god or gods, then you believe that god can do this.
If you don't then I claim it is completely impossible. I could have included "magic" but I thought this would be flippant in the context in which the OP asked the question. Inner-planetary collisions There are numerical simulations indicating the "Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars, and Venus with Earth" within 5 Gyr time-scales, published in Nature by Laskar and Gastineau For certain grazing impacts, "angular momentum dominates" according to Elkins-Tanton and Weiss as shown in one of the excellent figures from their paper: A sufficiently energetic inter-planetary collision could certainly change Earth's spin direction and either merge, graze, or potentially strip the mantle.
Exoplanetary collisions Also, I don't think we can rule out the possibility of a near miss of our Solar System with another stellar system within the Milky Way. Notes: One could argue that after a planetary collision, the Earth's composition would be so changed that it would no longer be the Earth. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password.
Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta. The more consequential result of a reverse spin, Gibbs explains, would be to upend the pattern of the Coriolis effect, which "transfers the spin of the earth into the motion of winds around a weather system.
The jet stream too would reverse, and that would dramatically change weather patterns. He explains:. This river of high altitude, fast-moving air steers the mid-latitude depressions across the planet from west to east. Swirling masses of cloud and rain are pushed from Japan to the Pacific coast of America, and from Newfoundland to Cornwall.
Reverse the flow and climate changes dramatically. The British Isles loses the moderating effect of weather from the Atlantic. A harsher continental climate becomes more likely, with a predominantly easterly flow bringing bitter Siberian winds in winter and hot, dry weather in summer. Goodbye green and pleasant land. Tradewinds too would switch. If the earth abruptly changed its rotational direction, probably many things we see every day would be destroyed.
Skipping over the transition, however, an earth rotating in the opposite direction would, among other things, cause the sun, moon and stars to appear to rise in the west and set in the east.
This earth also would probably have much different climate and weather patterns than we have now. The world's weather systems move with the earth's rotation, so patterns on the continents would reverse. Southern California's mild, dry climate might change into Florida's hot, wet and stormy climate, for example. Ocean currents like the Gulf Stream would flow in opposite directions, probably upsetting things like the thermohaline circulation. Much of the North Atlantic would become much colder.
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