As with most science blog material, I found this via StumbleUpon. This guy wrote an article on what the earth would be like if it slowly came to a rotational stop. I’m going to ramble about it, but read the article anyway, ‘cause it’s got cool pictures to go along with everything.

So if the earth were to slow to a stop over the course of a few decades, the length of the year would remain the same (rotation about earth’s axis is ceasing, not its revolution around the sun), but the length of the day would grow to almost the same amount of time.

Okay, cool.

Much more severely, though, a lack of rotation = lack of centrifugal force—which means that all of a sudden it’s gravity’s turn to take over the main control of the oceans. Since the earth has been spinning for quite some time now, it has taken on the shape of an ellipsoid. What does this mean? It means that the gravity of the “still earth” would be greatest at the poles. And since gravity would suddenly get promoted to Ocean Headmaster in this world of axial stillness, the world’s oceans would slowly begin to “drain” to the poles. ‘Cause gravity’s lazy like that. I like how the article, at this point, basically says “the math for this is probably freaking insane, so we don’t really know how the interplay between rotational slowdown and separating oceans would truly play out.”

So with the oceans taking a trip to the higher latitudes (and after the point where the rotational inertia decreases to the point where the oceans fully separate), the previously underwater land around the equator will start to emerge, until the earth suddenly had one big continent around it’s equatorial belt (Pangaea II: This Time It’s Circumnavigational) and two mega polar-central oceans. Again, check out the article maps for helpful visuals on how weird our planet would then look.

Snazzy? I CERTAINLY THINK SO.

Oh, here’s the article.
Today’s song: 21 by Death Metal Disco Scene