A lot of water would run "downhill."
Unfortunately, there wouldn't be time to build the Intercontinental Highway System before the weather went to hell.
The Earth is a sphere with gravity pulling from the center. The equater is a man made construct as there is no 'middle" on a sphere. Why wouldn't the water behave as it does now and flow towards the lowest points, i.e. the ocean beds.
If the thermosphere would disappear, would the Earth spin faster?
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/15jul_thermosphere/
Unfortunately, if the Earth stopped spinning, some of the water would ultimately be trapped underneath as ice and the rest would subblimate to space since, if this scenario would hold, our atmosphere would be 'nil', or nearly gone.
Hmmm, maybe, just maybe something similar may have happened on Mars. Interesting... maybe Earth can hold on to her dynamo longer than Mars did (I know, Earth is bigger.)
Eventually, one half size of the Earth will face the sun and it would be an un-earthly(life on the surface) temperature and likewise on the dark side, it would be an un-earthly(life-sustaining) temps. On the dark side, there would not be any sauna/plant life; but maybe on the 'terminator' side... all sides, there may plant life exist unless we go underground.
Interesting.
There's always the up side, but no one's curious of seemingly interested.
Tom, can you repost that link a bit clearer? It got garbled somehow and I can't fish it back from the archive with their limited search function...
Pop-Sci Article
ESRI Site
Thanks, AINZ. The popsci link continues to exclude me, but the ESRI original is excellent. This is the sort of planetary geometry game that I love to play - a "what if" scenario completely out of left field.
of course, slowing the Earth's spin would require the removal of a prodigious amount of energy, but we can pretend that some Sci-Fi device could do that - maybe transfer the spin to Venus or Mercury, or even our Moon (imagine if THAT visibly rotated?).
There would be further consequences of this out-of-equilibrium earth - the rocks would want to sag back to a sphere, too, but this would take a long time. Glacial rebound in the Baltic sea region is moving at the rate of about 1 cm per century, and a 10,000 to 100,000 year timescale should see most of the load relieved, but I rather suspect that a wholly out-of-figure Earth with 8 km of long-wavelength topographic mkissfit would triger planet-scale earthquakes like those that formed the thrust sheets on the crust of Mercury, except they would all be happening in a hurry! The article does mention these effects, but moves on quickly.
An interesting thought experiment...
This is of course a "thought experiment," since nothing could stop the Earth's rotation in its present continental form short of magical technology, and from what I've read, the sun will expand into a red giant long before the Earth is dragged naturally into a sun-locked position by tidal forces. In fact, this may happen even before the Earth and Moon lock together in a natural 47-day cycle.
But if one side of the Earth faced the sun all the time, would it become uninhabitable everywhere? The atmosphere would continue to circulate to some extent. Certainly water on the dark side (which, unlike the Moon term, would really BE a "dark side") would freeze solid. Would the twilight zone be habitable? The polar areas would see "seasons" due to the tilt.
I read the full article and I would caution that fundamental assumptions probably invalidate the modelling - or at least limit it to special cases.
The model explicity assumes that there is ocean everywhere - i.e. the oceans never pile up in an ice cap on the cold side, and never dry up on the hot side. Further, the atmospheric model only allows for vapour-liquid phase transition, so ice and snow are never explicitly created. This distinctly limits the range of behaviours that may be observed.
In fact, the cold side will probably get cold enough, at the crest of the ice cap, for atmospheric gases to condense out and begin to dramatically thin the atmosphere and limit its ability to transport heat.
If you look at the Moon, the range of temperature between nightside and dayside is much larger than on the model of this tide-locked planet
I added a comment...
Weather on a tide-locked planet would be interesting, but boring. There would be a very cold side and a very hot side. Oceans would evaporate on the dry side and snow fall on the cold side to form a hemispherical ice cap many km in height, and very slow glacial creep would bring ice back across the twilight zone where it would be melted by warm winds.
The planet would be pulled by the gradient of gravity (tide) to an elongate shape pointing towards the primary, but this would feel "flat" since it would be an equipotential surface, so any water levels would parallel the average surface shape.
I suspect that the planet would be rather arid, with most of the water locked-up in ice but there would be a meltwater zone around the icecap. Life should be possible.
Plate tectonics and volcanoes would not cease, merely because of this tidal lock and over millions of years, continents would move and mountain chains rise and fall, all capped by the ice on the cold dark side and arid as hell on the hot dry side. Sometimes, good ocean basins would form in the twilight zone and represent ideal environments for life. other times, conditions would not favour oceans and life would retreat to a periglacial habitat.
It's possible that biological systems would evolve to transport water out of the twilight zone, and maybe even influence sunshine, solar heating, and wind patterns.
Certainly, any sufficiently advanced civilisation would be able to engineer canals, lakes, seas, and their own Riviera, where it would always be dawn, or sunset.
Pass the gin and tonic, TB...
Atmospheric dynamics of Earth-like tidally locked aquaplanets
Found this while daydreaming about M Dwarf planets. The full PDF is here
The links to the animations they provide don't work, but I found them here and here
Somewhere out there, there has to be a boatload of worlds like this.
That paper answers a lot of the questions, but I need to read it in more detail to glean actual weather. For our thought experiment we'd be looking at the rotation period of 365 days, of course. I was surprised that the lowest baseline temperature, even on the night side, was as high as 240 degrees K (about -30 degrees F) and the highest was as lows as 300 degrees K (about 81 degrees F!).
I have yet to read the full article buty I would caution that one fundamental assumption may invalidate the modelling - or at least limit it to special cases.
I'll read more, and say more later...
I spotted that later. In real life, any water vapor would go over to the cold side, snow out, and never leave. There would be an interface in the twilight area where water melted off the edge of the hemispherical glacier, and this area would have moisture, but the hot side would be dry as a bone in the middle. I dare say the temperature range would be a lot wider too.
This one
My pleasure,
I had just finished reading a bit about the possibilities of tidally locked Earth like planets around M-Dwarf stars, when TB posted the Popsci article.
My imagination was already fired up, and this was truly icing for the cake.
It would be fantastic to see a filmmaker like James Cameron, bring such a world to life.
Yeah, well, he would not be alone and those that know would be ready to know the difference.
As for knowing the difference:
1) Knowledge
2) Money
Just in case...
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/what-would-earth-look-if-it-stopped-spinning
http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html
Posting replies
If the Earth stopped spinning...
A lot of water would run "downhill."
Unfortunately, there wouldn't be time to build the Intercontinental Highway System before the weather went to hell.