Due to the eastward rotation of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and all the celestial bodies we can see always seem to rise from this direction and set in the west. But what if the Earth was turned upside down? what would change?
Since we cannot stop the Earth and turn it around, to find the answer to this thought, we need to imagine a planet just like ours but rotating westward. If Earth stopped spinning, there would be apocalyptic tsunamis, oceans migrating to the poles, and the magnetic field necessary for us to deal with so many problems would not exist. So we have to imagine the Earth spinning in the opposite direction from tomorrow morning, without anything else being adversely affected.
What would change if the world turned upside down?
The first thing we would notice tomorrow morning would be the sun rising in the west. The most important thing that will change is, of course, the weather.
The rotation of our planet affects the winds. This phenomenon is known as the Coriolis effect and is often and erroneously seen as the cause of which direction the water in the toilet will go, depending on whether you are north or south of the equator. As in the case of a toilet, you should not consider the toilet experiment to be accurate, as the way a house is built can alter this effect.
But in the atmosphere, this effect is fully valid and everything will be a reflection of each other. Trade winds at the equator will no longer blow west, and easterly winds at mid-latitudes such as the USA and Europe, as well as parts of Argentina and Australia will no longer travel in that direction.
Considering that the biodiversity on the planet is dependent on adaptations that take a long time to develop, and that in this thought experiment we placed everything in an opposite world, we can be confident that many species, including ourselves, will be affected. A simple example is that trade winds at the equator bring nutrients from the Sahara to the Amazon, helping the region’s incredible biodiversity. If these winds did not blow in the same way, this important process could not occur.
Ocean currents are also affected by the rotation of the planet and by winds in coastal areas. The built-in flow of hot or cold water in the oceans will change completely, with bizarre effects across the planet, and the immediate impact this will have is difficult to quantify.
When we look at a scenario where the reversal situation took place a few thousand years ago, we can see a very different world.
In fact, a 2018 paper modeled a counter-rotating Earth-analogue. One of the most obvious differences with this model is in the Sahara. There would be no desert there. Africa and the Middle East would be much greener than they are today. Instead, the south of the United States, the Caribbean, Central America, southern Brazil and Argentina would become desert. Japan and the east coast of China would also become desert.
Changes in winds and currents also affect temperatures and precipitation. While regions that have now turned into deserts will of course become much hotter and drier, there will be changes in other areas as well. Areas like Europe, the Maghreb and the Middle East, parts of Australia and New Zealand could have been much colder and wetter places.
All the planets in the Solar System revolve around the Sun in the same direction. Thanks to the conservation of the angular momentum of the gas cloud that makes up the Sun, we all continue our journey in sync. However, it is not impossible for a planet to rotate in the opposite direction. Uranus had a major collision that caused it to spin on its side, so during its 84-year journey around the Sun, its poles face the Sun directly during its summer seasons.
Venus rotates in the opposite direction
Venus might be a more interesting example. Earth’s deadly hot twin has an extremely slow day (about 224 times longer than Earth’s) and spins in the opposite direction. That is, the Sun must set in the east on Venus, as can be easily seen if there were no continuous cloud cover and each day would not last more than 100 days relative to Earth. But we don’t know why Venus rotates in the opposite direction.
Possibilities include the planet turning 180 degrees due to the Sun’s gravity and the behavior of its interior. Another option is that the aforementioned effect, as well as the gravity of other planets in Venus’ atmosphere, slows its rotation until it stops and then reverses it.
Although a decision has not yet been made on Venus, we know that if the Earth were reversed, at least there would be no end to life and humanity. Even though our planet will become a completely different place…
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