It is easy to forget that while it feels like we are sitting still, we are actually moving through space at thousands of miles per hour while the Earth is also spinning quite rapidly. Fortunately, our speed and rotation aren’t likely to stop anytime soon, so we don’t have much to worry about.

But what if the Earth did stop spinning.

To put it mildly, it would be terrible and mean almost certain death for all humans and almost all animals.

If you are at the equator, you are spinning at about 1670 kilometers (1038 miles) per hour. If the Earth suddenly slammed to a stop, you would keep moving at that speed until something stopped you. For most people, that would mean slamming into the nearest wall to their East.

Even if you aren’t at the equator, you would be moving at hundreds of kilometers/miles per hour, suffering a similar fate.

If you happened to be near the North or South poles, you might be able to survive for a moment, but let’s face it. There aren’t many people in these areas.

If you did manage to avoid slamming into a hard object somehow, there would be other things waiting to kill you.

All the oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water, for example, would be moving at the speed the Earth was spinning. This means you would have the largest tsunamis the world has ever known almost instantly and in places around the world. These bodies of water would kill almost everyone (if they were able to survive slamming into hard objects).

For those who were ‘lucky’ enough to be at the poles, your time is coming. The spinning of the Earth causes the planet to bulge out at the equator. If that suddenly stops, the water and much of the other mass of the Earth would move back toward the poles.

People living up there would see massive waves of water, huge earthquakes, and a variety of other issues that would mean almost certain death.

To put it simply, we can all be very thankful that the Earth is not going to suddenly stop spinning.

If you would like to dive deeper into what would happen, this fun animated video will inform (and maybe terrify) you.

Let’s just keep the world spinning.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.