What if the Earth stopped spinning for 5 seconds?

As you might know, the planet we live on spins at incredibly high speeds at all times. At the equator– which is the fastest part of the earth– the Earth reaches speeds of around a whopping 1,670 kilometres per hour, for reference, the sound barrier is broken around 1,234 kilometres per hour so if anything else moved at that kind of speed it would be outstandingly fast. 

So then this brings forth the question, just why are we fine if the planet is spinning this fast? Well that’s because of the gravity that saves us, it counters the centrifugal force– in a sense– of the earth’s speed that would have otherwise flung us faster than the speed of sound. Now this brings forth an even more interesting doubt, just what exactly would happen if the earth ceased this rotation for let’s say, 5 seconds? Well a quick spoiler– it would be devastating! 

One might think that there won’t be any other effects other than us getting dizzy since the earth’s spin that we’re so used to is no longer there, but the fact is that the earth isn’t the only thing spinning, the atmosphere that surrounds us would not have stopped spinning if only the earth stopped spinning, well at least not yet, but the fact is that people would be struck by supersonic winds on the surface, it would be strong enough to destroy almost all human structures and of course nearly all humans– it may as well spell the end of humanity. 

However, it doesn’t end there, there are a lot of underground human structures that would be spared by these winds due to being out of their reach, in the same way there would be people inhabiting those structures– who would strangely notice losing connection to the entire surface world. Would the people underground at the time be the only ones left alive at the time though? Well the answer is no. The wind speed is the fastest around the equator of course, there would be nearly nothing that could stand in the way of the winds at the equator, but as it gets further from the equator the wind speeds will be slower, specifically, they will be slowest at the poles of the earth. So any humans inhabiting the poles would experience the same phenomena as the people underground, depending on their relative position from the poles they might notice abnormally strong winds but not strong enough to destroy everything in sight like the ones at the equator. 

Thankfully, we don’t know of any phenomena that can cause this kind of catastrophe, one might fear a supervillain trying to weaponise something of this sort, but in reality it is simply impossible according to the laws of physics, the planet just has too much inertia. Nonetheless, it would spark an extremely odd disadster if something like this were really to happen.