This might make a fabulous setting for a science fiction novel. From Esri.com:
If earth ceased rotating about its axis but continued revolving around the sun and its axis of rotation maintained the same inclination, the length of a year would remain the same, but a day would last as long as a year. In this fictitious scenario, the sequential disappearance of centrifugal force would cause a catastrophic change in climate and disastrous geologic adjustments (expressed as devastating earthquakes) to the transforming equipotential gravitational state.
The lack of the centrifugal effect would result in the gravity of the earth being the only significant force controlling the extent of the oceans. Prominent celestial bodies such as the moon and sun would also play a role, but because of their distance from the earth, their impact on the extent of global oceans would be negligible. […]
If the earth stood still, the oceans would gradually migrate toward the poles and cause land in the equatorial region to emerge. This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans.
(Via Boing Boing.)
The scenario you depict is that from the reference frame of someone on a body that is relatively stationary relative to the Solar System the Earth would not revolve. But my understanding is that such a situation is unlikely to actually ever occur.
The Earth’s spin is very slowly slowing down. The Earth’s orbit is prograde; the night side of the Earth spins in the same direction as the Earth is moving in it’s orbit around the Sun. Looking down at the North Pole the Earth’s orbit and the Earth’s spin are both counter-clockwise. While the Moon may have some effect on this, I believe that the end point will be that of what is currently Mercury’s status relative to the Sun or of the Moon’s relative to the Earth; the Earth’s rotation will become tidally locked to the Sun and the same face of the Earth will face the Sun constantly, with some slight variations (called libation) due to the changing speed of the Earth’s orbit (which is a function of the eccentricity of it’s elliptical shape).
At that point the Earth’s rotational speed will be maintained by gravitational interaction with the Sun and will be locked. I don’t think that it will ever slow down further to the point that’s described above. Mind you, it’s still an interesting concept for a SF story, but I don’t believe it is consistent with our current understanding of planetary mechanics.
So far, any such bodies in the Solar system to my knowledge are rocky. The effect of having one side of a body with oceans, etc. constantly facing the Sun (and the other side constantly facing away) would probably also form an interesting premise for an SF story. It would certainly have an strong effect on people (and other organisms) living there. Where what kind of food (animal and vegetable) could grow where, what could be adapted to such conditions, where and how intense precipitation would occur, wind patterns, etc., etc.
I could totally imagine a story that starts centuries or millinea (I’m talking long enough that everyone would think that the world never spun in the first place) after said event and then for some unknown reason the earth starts spinning again.
Or you could start your story immediately after the end of the spinning and the emergence of the new land. If you look at that map the newly exposed land would add physical connections between continents and nations that weren’t there before. The poltical turmoil (which would go beyond “who gets to claim the new land” and “what needs to be done to protect our new borders”)would be great story material.
Or you could write a story about the event itself. (Side note – In the Marvel Universe its been said that the character Magneto actually has the power to do just this, as well as knocking Earth out of its orbit, but such a thing would be out of character for him.)
@Danny – the catastrophic damage of such a scenario means that most people would be concerned with surviving instead of braving the new intercontinental ex-oceanic landbridges. I’m thinking the intervening catastrophes before things reached a steady-state would be something vaguely like that “2012” movie, not to mention the newly hostile weather-patterns. A change in angle-of-incidence due to earth’s axial-tilt converts balmy temperatures into freezing blizzards. Imagine how cold it would get at the 100th day of night? Would lakes boil after 30 nightless days of noon sun?
True Foo but such a story wouldn’t be the first time people would put land/power grab ahead of the necessity of surviving.
I’m not a geophysicist, but it seems to me that the model is failing to account for something, or at least, that they did not mention accounting for it.
As I understand it, the crust of the earth can be divided roughly into two categories: denser and lighter. It all floats on the liquid core of the planet. The lighter stuff is the land, which floats higher. The denser stuff is the ocean floors, which floats lower.
Point is, all of it floats, essentially. On a liquid core. Which the spin of the earth deforms into an oblate spheroid, as illustrated on the web site.
So if the earth stopped spinning, the molten core would presumably adopt a more spherical shape, and the crust, after much upheaval, would settle down to floating, as usual, except that now it would be floating on a sphere.
And the denser parts would still be denser, and the lighter parts would still be lighter, and we’d be more-or-less back where we started, with no enormous polar oceans and equatorial megacontinent, because the crust under the polar regions would still be sitting higher, because it’s less dense.
Leaving that aside, however, there would be other atmospheric effects which would make the globe conventionally uninhabitable, and therefore unusable as a story setting without some artificial environments. Silenced is Foo is correct in saying that the face away from the sun would get mighty cold, and the face toward the sun would get mighty hot. In addition, in the border zones between hot and cold, the hot air would be expanding and rising, and the cold air would be contracting and falling, and between the two you’d have winds. “Hurricane force” would be utterly inadequate to describe the force of these winds. And they would ring the globe, moving as the terminator moves.
So, on the surface you could choose between very much too hot, very much too cold, or juuuuuuuuuuuust right but airborne and sandblasted.
H. Beam Piper wrote a wonderful novella entitled _Four Day Planet_, set on Fenris, a world which turns four times in a year. He got the temperatures right, and also correctly reasoned that the good place to live on Fenris would be in the oceans, because they’d be much more stable in temperature. Alas, he neglected the winds, and so he has a very large interstellar ship landing at sundown, floating down on contragravity, bouncing gently as the tugs pull on it.
It’s a bit of a pity, because Fenris’ slow spin was not essential to the story, and so he could have gotten it right without hurting the story.
But it’s a hell of a good yarn, and I recommend it highly.
Grace
This seems like a poor premise for an sf story to me, although it might just be that my story sense went “bleah” rather than anything inherent in the idea. I mean, if I want disaster scenarios there are many more plausible, and I really doubt I could get the planetary mechanics or the geology to pass any knowledgeable smell test.
I wouldn’t ordinarily comment to be down on something like this because, you know, why? But in this case, I wanted to say that I think an idea like this that people look at and go “oo, neat SF!” actually isn’t, and I think that’s symptomatic of something that’s intrinsic to SF as a field.
SF writers tend to be (though aren’t always, alas) interested in science. We think it’s cool. It’s one of the major factors that creates us as a sub-community. So we look at something like “ooo, neat theories about what could happen if the earth stopped spinning” and go “there should be a story in that!” Because it’s neat and exciting and we want to share it. But there’s not much of a story, really, because the scientific interest and the human interest have a minimal intersection (beyond implausible disaster scenarios). This is similar to the reason why there are a lot of really, really cool concepts about cosmology that I learned at launch pad and which I frustratingly can’t use in stories, at least not easily, because they have relatively little human dimension to them.
Analog does publish stories sometimes where two scientists get into an argument about an abstract scientific concept, and then one of them gets proved right… but it’s not really where the rest of the field is going, imo.
I guess what I mean is the intersection between “am I a cool scientific scenario?” and “am I a cool science fiction story?” is not as close to 100% as we sometimes wish it would be.