Here’s why science says we don’t feel the Earth’s rotation

You shouldn’t be surprised that our planet is always spinning, along with its atmosphere and everything else on it. At the equator, the speed of rotation is about 1,675 km/h (1,040 mph). This means that right now, you’re moving at about 465 m/s, or a little less if you’re closer to one of the poles.

Why can’t everyone feel it? The answer is found in how the Earth moves. Think about being on an airplane that is flying smoothly at the same speed and altitude. You took off your seatbelt to walk down the aisle, but you can’t feel the plane moving. The reason is easy to understand: you, the plane, and everything in it are all moving at the same speed. To see how the plane is moving, you have to look out the window at the clouds.

The same is true of Earth’s rotation. Every 23 hours and 56 minutes, our planet completes a full turn around its axis. It keeps spinning at a rate that is almost always the same. One way to know you’re moving is to feel the wind on your face, but keep in mind that the air around us is also moving at the same speed.

If Earth’s speed changed, we’d definitely feel it, and it wouldn’t be a good thing, like a sudden stop on a planetary scale (while the atmosphere would keep moving at the same 465 metres per second and wipe the surface of the planet). But just like we can’t feel the constant movement of an airplane, we usually can’t feel the spin of our huge space ride either.

So why does the Earth spin all the time? Because nothing could stop it. When our Solar System formed from a dust cloud that collapsed and turned into a flattened accretion disk with a bulge in the middle, all of the planets took on the same rotation. Because of inertia, the Sun, all the other planets, their moons, and everything else in our solar system still spin after billions of years.

To stop that, an unbalanced force from the outside would have to be applied. To put it simply, the whole thing would have to hit something else and throw off the rotation.

Now, as I said before, our planet spins at a rate that is almost always the same. If we want to be exact, we could say that the Moon’s gravity is slowing down Earth just a little bit. It pulls on our planet’s tidal bulge, which causes tidal friction and adds energy to the Moon’s orbit.

Because of this, we sometimes need to add an extra second to our clocks because the Earth’s rotation slows down by two-thousandths of a second every day. But this change in speed is so tiny that, from our point of view, it still seems like Earth is turning at the same speed. That is, it doesn’t feel like anything at all.