| Johnw1104 said: I'm a little confused as to what you're claiming here. The speed at which the earth rotates on the equator is indeed a little over 1,000 mph, and the speed does indeed also decrease as you move away from the equator. My best friend's uncle is a very literal rocket scientist (engineer) and he told us (and I've since confirmed via research) one of the main reasons that space agencies tend to be located near the equator (such as the one I live near, Cape Canaveral) is because the additional speed reduces the necessary amount of fuel and therefore also reduces the weight. They've been piggybacking off of that for quite some time. The surface of the earth is little more than a crust floating atop far hotter and denser materials, all which are being pulled inward by gravity and also being pulled by the orbiting moon, which leads to a great deal of churning. Still, the crust is relatively stable (at least from our short-existence perspectives) as a result of both floating atop said core, but also because of the consistency of its rotation along its axis and the stabilizing force that the moon has served upon the axis itself. This notion that "the earth's surface would be untenable if the equator rotated faster than polar regions" would likely be true if the earth were suddenly a perfect sphere. It is not, however, a perfect sphere, but is instead an oblate spheroid (picture something closer to a more rounded rugby ball). Those very forces resulting from the earth's rotation caused it to slightly flatten dating back to it first coalescing, which is why we have both an "equatorial diameter (~12,756 km)" and a "polar diameter" (~12,713 km)" (the difference being called an "equatorial bulge", which just about all active planets have), and why we have both an actual highest point on earth in Mount Chimborazu in Ecuador and a "highest point above sea level" in Mount Everest. These differences have been measured for ages now, with atomic clocks actually being modified to correct for such time dilating relativistic issues back in the 1970's, as altitude, speed, and even the stronger pull of gravity in the polar regions (a result of the earth's shape, with the equator bowing out and the polar regions therefore being closer to the center of gravity) all require clocks equipped to compensate for the differences if they are to maintain a consistent time or communicate with the GPS. These forces have been measured just about every way it's possible to measure them, so it's not so much theory as it is mandatory that the equator rotates faster than the polar regions; it simply isn't possible for any three dimensional shape to rotate on an axis without experiencing variations of speed along its surface, unless it is a "doesn't actually exist" perfect sphere, but even then there would be some bulging depending on the material and the speed of rotation. I'm not sure if we're on the same page or not to be honest. |
Was there an actual disagreement here? I know that flat-earthers often use an argument that fails to delineate between angular and linear velocity/momentum.
If you mess that up, I can see a cavalcade of successive errors borne out of the confusion.
