Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
If Earth rotate in the opposite direction, then Sun will also rise from the west. If this happens, then what are the effects?
According to a computer simulation presented earlier this month at the 2018 European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Austria, if the sun’s rising direction changed, the desert would cover North America. Barren dunes will replace the expanses of the Amazon rainforest in South America, and lush green landscapes will expand from central Africa to the Middle East.
In the simulation, not only will deserts disappear from some continents and appear on others, but a freezing winter will hit western Europe.
Scientists also reported at the conference that cyanobacteria, a group of bacteria that produce oxygen through photosynthesis, could proliferate where they had never been before if the sun rose from the west. And the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), an important climate-regulating ocean current in the Atlantic, is fading and reappearing in the northern Pacific Ocean.
Then the Earth is expected to circle the sun every 24 hours, rotating at a speed of about 1,040 mph (1,670 km/h) as measured at the equator. The direction of rotation is prograde, or west to east, which appears counterclockwise when viewed from above the North Pole, and it is common to all the planets in our solar system except Venus and Uranus.
As reported Live Science, as the Earth rotates, the push and pull of its momentum forms ocean currents, which, together with the flow of atmospheric winds, produce various climatic patterns around the world.
New Climatic Conditions
To study how Earth’s climate system is affected by rotation, scientists recently modeled a digital version of Earth rotating counterclockwise or clockwise when viewed from above the North Pole, a direction known as retrograde.
Florian Ziemen, one of the makers of the simulation, and a researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany said from the modeling results, Earth’s topography will remain the same but there will be much different climate changes.
“[Membalikkan rotasi Bumi] retains all major topographical characteristics such as the size, shape and position of continents and oceans, while creating a completely different set of conditions for interactions between circulation and topography,” said Ziemen.
This new rotation regulates ocean currents and winds to interact with the continents in different ways, producing entirely new climatic conditions around the world.
Expert Prediction If the Sun Rises from the West
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