‘Sea level’ isn’t level. As the strength of the force generated by the Earth’s spin is strongest at the equator, the average sea level bulges outward there, putting it further from the centre of the Earth than at the poles. Differences in the strength of the Earth’s gravity at different points also cause variation.
100 Mind-Blowing Spin Facts
Venus is the only planet to spin clockwise.
Marla Gibbs continued to work as a flight attendant for two years after being cast on a hit TV show. Before taking her place on the stoop of 227, Marla Gibbs played the housekeeper Florence on The Jeffersons (a spin-off of All in the Family). In a 2015 interview, Gibbs told the Washington Post that despite it appearing as though she had gotten her big break, she kept her job as a flight attendant for American Airlines for two more years—just to be safe.
Venus is the only planet to spin clockwise. It travels around the sun once every 225 Earth days but it rotates clockwise once every 243 days.
Not sporty? Try aggressive sitting. Ok, it’s not as tame as it sounds – think skateboard tricks but with a stool. Sporthocking is a unique German street sport created in 2007. It combines the principle of skateboarding with a distinct rubber-lined funnel stool instead of a board. Participants can spin, kick, throw, juggle, and slide. However, the hocker rule of thumb is they always have to slam their bottoms down on the stool to signify the end of each trick.
Earthquakes can permanently shorten the length of the Earth’s day. If a strong enough Earthquake occurs, it can move the spin of the Earth’s axis. The 2011 Earthquake in Japan knocked 1.8 microseconds off our days according to researchers.
Only hard-boiled eggs spin. Soft-boiled eggs and raw eggs do not spin like hard-boiled eggs do mainly because of their liquid inside. Hard-boiled eggs spin faster and more equally because the yolk inside is hard.
Out of all the planets, Venus is the only one to spin clockwise.
All planets spin counterclockwise except for Venus.
Our days are getting longer. Earth’s spin speed is slowing: every year, it takes our planet a little longer to complete one full revolution on its axis. The change is miniscule, however. Every century, Earth slows by 1/500th of a second; 1,000 years from now, one day will be two-hundredths of a second longer than today.
A neutron star can spin 600 times in one second.
The actor who played Scotty from Star Trek was given an honorary degree at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. The original series only ran for three years, from 1966 to 1969, but it has since inspired generations and led to countless spin-offs. Scotty, who the late James Montgomery Doohan played, was the lead engineer aboard the fictional USS Enterprise spaceship. When the Milwaukee School of Engineering discovered that more than half of its students were inspired to take up engineering because of Scotty, they awarded Doohan with an honorary engineering doctorate.
Days on Venus are longer than years. Due to its slow axis rotation, it takes 243 Earth days to spin once; but it only takes 225 Earth days to go around the sun.
C-3PO and R2-D2 had their own 1985 single-season 13-episode spin-off TV series called Star Wars: Droids. The season showed the adventures of R2-D2 & C-3P0 before they joined Luke Skywalker.
Gravity is also the reason why our days are getting longer. Over a billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted around 18 hours. Our days are longer now because the moon’s gravity is causing Earth’s spin to slow down. In Earth’s earlier days, the moon wasn’t as far away, which caused Earth to spin much faster than it currently does. Longer days also mean shorter years—kind of. The time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun hasn’t changed, but the amount of days within a year has. Back when the dinosaurs ruled 70 million years ago, days were only around 23.5 hours long, and a year was made up of 372 of those slightly shorter days.
Because astronomical time and atomic time don’t always line up, every so often, we get a leap second. Earth’s spin speed can be a bit unpredictable. Atmospheric winds, Northern Hemisphere winters with heavy snow, and other big weather systems can affect how fast the planet rotates. To keep the difference between astronomical time and atomic time to less than .9 seconds, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service will occasionally announce the need for a leap second. Most people won’t notice a leap second, but they can be a huge pain for tech companies. Because leap seconds are added irregularly, developers have no way of working them into their codes, which has caused websites like LinkedIn and Reddit to crash in the past. A bug caused by 2012’s leap second created so much chaos on Qantas’s servers, more than 400 flights wound up being delayed.