What if the earth rotated faster?

Day 145 / 365

I have a fun little science lesson for you guys today.

Imagine you tie a stone to a long rubber band and then start rotating it about. The rubber band would begin to stretch right? It’s as if something is pushing the stone outwards. If you rotate it hard enough, the string might just break and the stone will fly off. This force that’s pushing the stone outwards is called the centrifugal force.

Another place where we experience this force is when you are sitting in a car and it takes a sharp turn. If the car turns right, you will feel being pushed to the left. It’s again due to the centrifugal force.

Now the earth that we are living on, is also rotating at a high speed. It completes one rotation in 24 hours. But why don’t we get pushed outwards, which in this case would be towards the sky? The answer to that question is Gravity. The centrifugal force is pushing us away from the earth, but its gravitational force is pulling us towards it. Thankfully the gravitational force is stronger, and so we get to stay on the ground.

But remember the stone and rubber band experiment? as the speed of rotation increased, the centrifugal force increased as well. So if the earth rotated faster as well, the centrifugal force that’s pushing us outwards will increase as well. If it rotates about 17 times faster than it is currently, the force would be strong enough to make us fly off into space!

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The Statue of Liberty