Vsauce 1

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
The Earth is ___________and we are

___________ along with it. But what if the Earth ___________ stopped
spinning?
Well, first of all, you would gain ___________. But that would be the
___________of your worries. The spin of our planet is important and
literally ___________ you the time of your life. At the equator, the
___________, and everything on it, is spinning around at 465 meters per
second. As you move closer to the poles ______________________to
complete Earths daily rotation. Here in San Francisco, the Earth is
___________me east at 368 meters per second. If I could float
___________ the surface independent of the Earth's rotation, the Earth
would spin ___________ me this quickly. Pretty cool. But, of course, when
I jump ___________into the air, the Earth doesn't move ___________ me
because I continued to spin with it.
_________________________________ and that is why slamming on a
set of magical ___________that caused everything classically called earth
to stop spinning would be catastrophic. Immediately everything that
wasn't Earth, ______________________, would continue moving, as it
had been, and be flung due east at more than a thousand miles an hour.
You wouldn't be flung into space because escape velocity is 24,800 mph
but _________________________________ a 9.5 inch caliber bullet. Well,
really more of a supersonic tumbleweed. Because the atmosphere would
more ______________________, people in airplanes, assuming they could
navigate the resulting storms, might have a better chance of
___________. Astronauts aboard the ISS would fare even better. But it is
___________ that anyone would be waiting for them down on the
ground. Runways would just be entrances to the new planet-sized
___________, created by the no longer spinning Earth.
_________________________________might be okay but only at first.
Gusts of wind, as fast as those near an atomic bomb detonation, would
blast, _________________________________forming worldwide storms
of unprecedented magnitude. The friction alone, caused by the now
stopped Earth colliding with these winds, would be enough to cause
______________________, unparalleled erosion and damage to anything
strong enough to stay put after the initial braking. The Sun would seem to
___________ in the sky as days became not 24 hours long but 365 days
long.
Without spinning innards, Earth's protective magnetic field would cease to
exist and we would be dosed with deadly amounts of ionising radiation
from the Sun. The oceans would surge onto land in tsunamis kilometers
high and wash over nearly all dry land, before migrating to the poles,
where gravity is stronger, no longer held to the ocean basins by the inertia
Earth's spin gave them, until Earth itself, no longer bulging an extra 42
kilometers around its equator, because of its rotation slowly compressed
into a more perfect sphere than it is now. Possibly allowing the oceans to
eventually return somewhat. That is what would occur if it actually
happened. It won't actually happen but its rotation is slowing down.
More on that later. First, if the Earth really is spinning so quickly, why can't
we feel it? Why doesn't the Earth's rotation make us dizzy? Well, lucky for
us, the change in velocity is just too gradual. The Earth is too huge. It's like
driving in a car that takes 6 hours and six thousand miles to make one left
turn. It's not sudden enough to register with our senses. But that change
in velocity is real and it makes us weight less, because of inertia. On our
spinning planet your velocity is constantly changing but always tangential
to the circular path you were being dragged along.
Now, because inertia is a property of matter, which includes your body,
without a force acting upon us we would slowly leave the surface of Earth.
Luckily, the Earth is exerting a force on us. A center-seeking, centripetal
force, delivered by gravity. The centripetal force required to keep you
along a circular path with Earth is subtracted from Earth's total
gravitational pull on you. The remaining force simply pushes you down,
toward the centre of the Earth - it gives you weight. At the equator, if the
Earth didn't spin, and no centripetal force was required to keep you with
the Earth, you would weigh 0.3 percent more than you currently do. If
Earth spun you around 17 times faster than it currently does, all of its
gravitational force would go toward centripetal force fighting against your
inertia and you would be weightless. So here's a diet idea. Hope that the
Earth starts spinning faster and go back for guilt-free seconds.

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Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.

The Earth is ___________and we are

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