Explain · analogy
What would happen if the Earth stopped spinning in terms of a playground roundabout that suddenly stops
If the Earth suddenly stopped spinning, it would be exactly like the moment the Year 9 rugby captain slams his foot onto the playground roundabout while you are still trying to maintain your dignity.
The physics here is simple: your feet stay attached to the tarmac, but your lunch, your school bag, and your sense of self-worth continue travelling at the original speed of the rotation. On a global scale, this means the ground halts, but the atmosphere and the oceans decide to keep going at about a thousand miles per hour. You end up being overtaken by your own atmosphere, which turns into a wind so strong it makes a gale force storm in Cornwall look like a gentle exhale from a slumbering pug. Every loose object, from the cat to the contents of your garden shed, effectively experiences a sudden promotion to orbital projectile.
Once the initial chaos settles, the long-term schedule becomes frankly tedious. Since the planet has stopped rotating, one side faces the sun for six months at a time, turning the garden into a permanent, scorched purgatory of burnt grass and dead begonias. Meanwhile, the other side gets six months of darkness, which is essentially just a very long, depressing Sunday evening in November. The local council would inevitably cancel bin collections because nobody can remember when the bin day is supposed to be when the day lasts for half a year.
Where the analogy breaks downA roundabout eventually stops because of friction, whereas the Earth has no such external brake to apply.