If I fly straight up in a helicopter and hover there, why doesn’t the earth continue to spin underneath me?

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Why doesn’t it spin independently of me and I end up in another country or something? And if a spaceship watched earth from afar, at one point would it start spinning with earth and at what point can it observe the rotations of earth without being part of it?

In: Planetary Science

23 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because the atmosphere rotates with the earth. If it didn’t, we’d constantly be running into stationary air at 1000 miles per hour.

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