What if Earth suddenly stopped spinning?

“First, nearly everyone would die; second, things would get interesting” should be this channel’s motto.

"They'd probably be confused, until someone noticed that the Sun had stopped moving across the sky. Then they'd be really confused."
This sounds like a perfect setup for a horror story.

"This is all Andrews fault" 🤣 These videos are brilliant... very enjoyable to watch!

3:55 Great job breaking everything, ANDREW.

My grandfather, a US Marine, was stationed in San Juan, Puerto Rico in August of 1955 when Hurricane Connie struck the island with wind speeds of 140 miles per hour. He had been ordered to take shelter in a concrete bunker with six feet thick walls only a few meters uphill from a large sandy beach. After spending days stuck in the bunker, he said that after the storm had subsided and they were able to go outside, the sand from the beach and the wind had acted like a sandblaster and reduced the thickness of the wall to only 3 or 4 feet.

2:05 The implication that they'd notice because the cats not moving is just hilarious!

Solution: We never ever again let Andrew near to any computers to ask for such disaster.

Randall is a multi-talented guy, I've been a fan of the comic for years and never knew that he could narrate videos too. You should have done this years ago!

You removed the cutest bit of this, where the moon says “hey… hey earth? What are you doing? Oh no… oh no. Don’t worry. I’m there for you” that part made me CRY and you *cut it.*

i always thought that if the earth stopped spinning we would all get thrown off the planet 💀

I like the thought of the moon acting as a battery for storing angular momentum, just in case we ever stop spinning for some reason

🤔 What if a Dinosaur 🦕 wiped out the Asteroids

Didn't mention the oceans rushing toward the poles due to lack of centrifugal force, or the immense earthquakes resulting from the equator suddenly finding itself 21km "higher" than the poles.

You've forgotten the absence of the centripetal effects on the Earth. The entire planet's tectonic surface would be destroyed.
I've noticed that a lot of people overlook the equatorial bulge collapsing whenever answering this question. The earth is 27 miles (43 kilometers) wider in radius due to its rotation. If it stopped spinning the tectonic plates and magma would fall.
I haven't done the math, but I strongly suspect that the equator would generate massive circular waves heading for each of the poles. The waves would "condense" and get bigger as they headed toward the poles, hense getting bigger. This would result in the tectonic plates shattering and exploding along the way. If I recall correctly the tectonic plates are only 50 miles k_80 kilometers)_ thick in certain areas. These waves would collide with themselves at the polls creating massive explosions launching debris into space. The Earth's surface would likely be remolten into magma Earth.

Nomad civilisations following the never-ending twilight/dawn over the course of a year in that small habitable zone between the scorching day and freezing night sounds like a banger post-apocalypse

I remember reading this when I was younger in What If 1 and having a massive existential crisis. Good times thanks to Andrew

As a teen, I wanted to write a post apocalyptic book about this. I wanted parts of it to be written in odd styling, like reading from an old book. And I carried the starting line with me for years.
In the seventh year of the war, when the sky fell upon the Earth with unimaginable terror, all things built above the land were torn asunder, and all things dug below the ground were left for plunder.

In 2:52, wouldn't East facing shores experience the opposite and have hugely receeding water exposing more land under the ocean?

The answer to this question in the original What If? was a formative moment for me as a young teen. I got the book from my uncle and at that point was pretty deep into this very... cult-level Christianity belief that humanity was the most important thing and the whole world was for humans. And the end of this answer, the idea that the Moon's orbit around Earth would slowly cause Earth to rotate again, it opened my mind in a very significant way to the idea that the universe will keep going after humanity is gone. The world will keep turning, quite literally. That there is reality before and after humanity. It's a difficult feeling to describe. It's not existential dread, I've never feared human extinction exactly. But it's certainly an existential sort of feeling, even now as an adult who's left a lot of those old beliefs behind.

The narration for these videos is top tier.

Eloquent, relaxed, and natural. No insanely compressed and bass-boosted voice, which (at least to me) seems insanely common these days. It's the little things, man.