What If the Earth Spun Faster and Couldn't Stop?

A Tuesday afternoon in October, in a small town at the head of a sea loch, halfway between the equator and the North Pole. The Earth starts to spin faster, and it never stops. The sun sets at half past five and rises again at three in the morning. The sea drains out of the harbour and runs away toward the equator, and every boat settles on the mud. Your ball rolls down a flat street on its own. The air leaves the same way, until the sky is black with the sun still up and the stars out at noon. Then "down" itself begins to lean: your street becomes a hill, the bins slide, the cars go one after another into the empty harbour, and you hold on to a lamp post while the hills, the trees and the houses come down around you. What is real: every figure on screen follows from the spin. At 45° north the ground under you moves at 1,181 km/h today; the faster it turns, the more the spin pulls you outward and toward the equator, so you weigh less and "down" tilts. You weigh least, 49.5 kg instead of 70, when your street tilts 45°, which happens just as people at the equator become weightless (an 84-minute day). At a 60-minute day you weigh 70 kg again, and your street is a wall. The sea and the air really would pile up toward the equator. 70 million years ago a day was about 23½ hours, and 1.4 billion years ago 18.7 hours. Jupiter turns in 9 h 56 min and has stripes; the dwarf planet Haumea turns in 3 h 55 min and is stretched into an egg. The top of Everest has a third of the air we breathe. The steepest street in the world, Ffordd Pen Llech in Harlech, is 37.45 % (about 20°). Loose soil slides at about 30–35°. What is not real, or made up: a spin that keeps speeding up (nothing could do that), and how fast it happens; the town, its street and its loch; how well the ball, the bins and the cars grip (estimates); the sea and the air leaving faster than they would; that you can breathe with the air gone; the Moon, drawn bigger than it looks; the Earth keeping its shape (a real Earth would flatten as it sped up, and start to come apart once its equator is weightless); and the very end. You held on to a lamp post for nine minutes while the Earth spun faster and faster. CHAPTERS 0:00 Flat yesterday 0:10 The window 0:38 The street 1:06 The harbour 1:40 Downhill 2:24 The sky 3:04 The air 3:45 The hill 4:27 The slide 5:30 The cars 6:14 The ground 7:11 The cliff 7:59 ??? HASHTAGS #whatif #earth #science #physics #space