I know what exactly will happen if the earth stops rotating all of a sudden – the momentum would cause untold destruction and everything not securely anchored to the ground would be hurled eastward at devastating speeds. I’ve seen a shittona clickbaity videos on YouTube. I also know the final result of this would be 6 months of daytime and 6 months of night. But what would be the other visible effects on earth which would start as soon the deceleration begins? Will we be able to survive?
In: Planetary Science
Technically, the Earth **is** slowly decelerating. It’s just over much more than 30 years. Each century, a day becomes almost 2ms longer.
Still, if it just decelerates before coming to a stop in 30 years, that’s slow enough to avoid any immediate collapse. It will mess up satellites and various time measurements, but nothing we can’t adapt to. That’s going to break a lot of computer systems for a while, but then we can take the change into account to fix it. So it’s just a messy transition period.
The real problems starts not because it decelerates, but because it becomes too slow. Having very long day and very long night is going to create much large differences in temperature. The nights are colder, the days are warmer. This in turn can lead to more violent winds. The climate get all messed up, far beyond the global warming that we know.
Once you reach about 6 month days and 6 months nights, most of the planet is wasted. Temperatures in the day are going to be hotter than the hottest summer we’ve ever seen, and nights are going to be colder than the coldest winter. We could try living on the small temperate zone in the twilight/dawn area. But that’s also where you should expect the most violent winds. And that area is moving, so we’d have to migrate to always follow it. How are we going to sustain agriculture in such a world?
Some forms of life are probably going to manage to adapt, maybe in the deep sea more than elsewhere. But I don’t think humanity will survive this for long.
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