` My home page features a little daily quote section, and today's read as follows: Even heavy automobile traffic out of New York City on a summer weekend minutely unbalances the earth as it rotates. -Paul Allman Siple New york city's population is 8 million plus people, so it could be a matter of millions of cars in action in a somewhat concentrated area, but would it really be enough to alter the rotation of the earth ? Paul Allman Siple is apparently an 'Antarctic explorer and geographer' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Siple
I think even with the cars the world is very "unbalanced"! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
` The mere fact of the presence of humanity is a great 'imbalance'. Also, I didn't mean all 8 million NYC-ers owned cars, just that there could be some number of millions in operation there at one time.
The Earth weighs 6 million billion billion kilograms so I don't think the weight of a few million cars is going to affect it.
Heh - agreed!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! By comparision, it would be like millions of bacteria on the surface of a spinning orange.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
This is hilarious but typical for what people in Earth Science forum pass off as "science." Where did the steel come from to make the cars?
It will change the earth's rotation by some non-zero amount, but if you calculate the change it will be so small that you might as well just call it zero.
That's six septillion kilograms, right? Six octillion grams. I think the powers-of-ten prefixes stop at zetta- for 10^21 so we're six zeros short. Is that 6,000,000 zettagrams? I don't think they're quite that dumb. I think what they're suggesting is that it's a large enough fraction of the earth's total mass that having them all concentrated in one place could have a significant effect on the planet's moment of inertia. But they're wrong, it's not and it wouldn't. All the cars in America don't weigh more than 100 billion kg. That has to be noise-level compared to the effect of the one-inch-per-year movement of the tectonic plates. BTW, the Earth doesn't really have a "weight" in our frame of reference. It has mass.
I don't think any plates move one inch per year. In fact I think the fastest plate moves maybe 2mm a year.
Yeah, obviously. Sorry. We'd be having a lot more earthquakes! But wait, aren't the continents drifting at the rate of several feet per century?
Perhaps because the intent was to inquire as to whether or not what was stated in Siple's claim could be possible, not to endorse it as factual.
