The Earth Might Flip Over At Any Time

It could happen slowly, but that might be worse

In the early days of space missions it was observed that spinning objects flip over spontaneously. This got people freaked out that it could happen to the Earth as a whole. Any solid object spinning in three dimensions will do this, and the amount of time it spends between flips has nothing to do with how quickly the flips happen.

Since then you might assume that this possibility was debunked. That didn’t happen. People just kind of got over it. The model of the Earth as a single solid object is overly simplistic, with some kind of fluid flows going on below the surface. Unfortunately we have no idea what those flows are actually doing and how they might affect this process. It’s a great irony of our universe that we know more about distant galaxies than the core of our own planet.

Unfortunately the one bit of evidence we have about the long-term stability of the Earth’s axis might point towards such flips happening regularly. The Earth’s magnetic field is known to invert every once in a while. But it’s just as plausible that what’s going on is the gooey molten inner core of the Earth keeps pointing in the same direction that whole time while the crunchy outer crust flips over.

If a flip like this happens over the course of a day then the Sun would go amusingly skeewumpus for a day and then start rising in the west and setting in the east. Unlike what you see in ‘The 3 body problem’ apparent gravity on the surface of the planet would remain normal that whole time. (The author of that book supposedly has a physics background. I’m calling shenanigans.) But there might be tides going an order of magnitude or higher than they normally go, and planetary weather patterns would invert causing all kinds of chaos. That would include California getting massive hurricanes from over the Pacific while Florida would be much more chill.

A suddenly flip like that is very unlikely, but that might not be a good thing. If the flip takes years then midway through it the poles will be aligned through the Sun, so they’ll spend months on end in either baking Sun or pitch black, getting baked to a crisp or frozen solid, far beyond the most extreme weather we have under normal circumstances. The equatorial regions will be spared, being in constant twilight, with the passage of time mostly denoted by spectacular northern and southern lights which alternate every 12 hours. And there will probably be lots of tectonic activity, but not as bad as on Venus.