If you deliberately drilled a huge hole at the
North Pole, and allowed all the earth's magma to
spill out, as the earth tilted, could the weight
shift, cause the earth to "flip" upside down, thus
causing a reversal? Sounds plausible to me.
Question Date: 2016-10-07
Answer 1:
No. The Earth would not tilt or flip. The
magma would spill out onto the surface as a lava
flow, and then the lava would freeze to rock and
plug the hole you drilled. The Earth is not
spinning upright on any sort of surface like a
spinning top: we draw maps such that north is up
just by convention. The direction of gravity is
inward toward the center, not southward.
People in Antarctica do not go flying off into
space.
