If the rotation is reversed, the Earth will become greener, the Sahara desert will become a lush jungle while the Amazon forest will turn into a dry sand dune.
If the Earth were to rotate in the opposite direction, the continents would undergo major changes. Deserts will cover North America, arid sand dunes will replace the Amazon jungle in South America, and lush green trees will sprout from Central Africa to the Middle East, according to computer simulations released announced earlier this month at the annual joint meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Austria, according to Live Science.
According to the simulation, not only will deserts disappear in some continents and reappear in others, but cold winters will sweep across Western Europe. Cyanobacteria, a group of bacteria that produce oxygen through photosynthesis, will thrive where they have never existed before. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation ( AMOC ), an important ocean current that helps regulate climate in the Atlantic Ocean, will gradually disappear and re-emerge in the northern Pacific Ocean.
During Earth’s one-year orbit around the Sun, our planet takes 24 hours to complete its rotation around its axis, rotating at a speed of about 1,670km/h according to measurements at the equator. The direction of Earth’s rotation is similar to that of neighboring bodies, from west to east, or counterclockwise if viewed from above the North Pole. This is the common rotation of all planets in the solar system, except Venus and Uranus, according to NASA.
The face of the Earth will change completely if the planet rotates in the opposite direction. (Artwork: Live Science).
As the Earth rotates, the attraction and repulsion from the planet’s momentum shape ocean currents, which, along with atmospheric winds, create many weather patterns around the globe. These patterns bring abundant rainfall to wet forests or dehumidify rain-scarce arid lands.
To study how Earth’s weather system is affected by its rotation, scientists modeled a digital version of the Earth’s rotation in an anti-clockwise direction. if observed from above the North Pole, said Florian Ziemen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Germany, who participated in simulated tectonics. “The reversal of the Earth’s rotation preserves all important topographical features such as the size, shape and position of continents and oceans, and creates a completely different set of conditions for the interaction between the Earth’s rings and the Earth’s surface. climate and topographic cycles,” said Ziemen.
The new rotation allows ocean currents and winds to interact with the continent in new ways, creating entirely new climatic conditions around the world. The team used the Max Planck Institute’s Model of the Earth System to alter the relationship between the Earth and the Sun and reverse the Coriolis effect, the invisible force pushing objects across the surface of a rotating planet.
After making adjustments and modeling showing the Earth rotating in the opposite direction, the researchers observed changes in the weather system over several thousand years. They found that the Earth rotating in the opposite direction would be greener. Global desert cover decreased from about 42 million square kilometers to 31 million square kilometers. Grass grows in half of the areas that were formerly desert, and trees grow in the other half. The new vegetation will store more carbon than the Earth rotates in the current direction. However, deserts will appear in many places that have never been seen before, such as the southeastern US, southern Brazil and Argentina, and northern China.
The change in rotation also reverses wind patterns across the globe, leading to temperature changes in the subtropics and mid-latitudes. The western part of the continents will be cooler while the eastern part will warm up and winters will be much colder in northwest Europe. Currents also change direction, warming the eastern edge and cooling the western edge of the seas.
The AMOC, the ocean current responsible for transporting warmth around the globe, will disappear from the Atlantic, but a similar, slightly stronger current will emerge in the Pacific, bringing warmth to eastern Russia. This is a bit unusual because previous Earth reversal studies did not detect this change. “But the AMOC is the result of many complex interactions in the climate system, there could be many reasons for this difference,” Ziemen explained.
The changing ocean currents in the Indian Ocean also allow cyanobacteria to proliferate in the region. For Ziemen, however, the greening of the Sahara is the most interesting change in their model.