“Five, four, three, two, one… jump!” As Greg Foot shouted the command into the microphone, the crowd of 50,000 at the Reading Festival leapt into the air for a few seconds before landing back on the ground. Researchers sitting at computers on the premises recorded that the mass jump triggered an earthquake measuring 0.6 on the Richter scale. “You’ve just caused an earthquake,” Greg shouted. The science journalist and presenter was trying to assess the answer to the age-old question of what would happen if everyone on Earth jumped at the same time. And he found the answer. BBC.
Apparently, Scientists believe High magnitude earthquakes can affect the Earth’s rotation and spin, even changing the length of a day by microseconds, a recent example being Taylor Swift’s Seattle concert. Herald SunWhile singing, the Swifties generated an enormous amount of electricity – enough to power about 6,000 car batteries and the equivalent of a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, like the 2011 Japanese earthquake, which was a magnitude 8.9 earthquake that shortened the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)Given these facts, Greg thought there might be a grain of truth in this urban legend.
So he wanted to know what would happen if more than 8 billion people on Earth jumped into the air at the same time. Although it’s highly unlikely that they would all jump at the same time, if that were to happen, what would be the impact on the planet? Will the planet move from its position?? Does the speed or rotation change? To find the answer, he BBC Earth Institute By getting 50,000 people to jump at the same time.
But as Greg explained in the video, the resulting magnitude 0.6 quake didn’t have a very noticeable effect on the planet. “Earthquakes don’t affect the Earth’s rotation until they reach at least a magnitude 8,” he explained. “And to do that, you’d need 7 million times as many people as currently living on Earth.” He concluded by saying, “That urban legend is a total lie. Even if we all jumped at the same time, we couldn’t move the Earth. We couldn’t even change the speed at which it rotates. It’s just not true.”
Many scientists have tried to answer this question before Gregg, and physicist Rhett Allan says that if everyone jumped at the same time, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Live ScienceThe jumps and landings cancel each other out, resulting in a net force of zero. But Alan said the mass jump gives the Earth a slight push, causing it to move about one-hundredth of the radius of a single hydrogen atom per second. “After they’ve all jumped, they’ll fall back down again, moving towards the Earth, during which time the Earth will rise again, and everything will be the same again,” he said.
