What are the possible directions of the Earth's rotations? ?

Question

What are the possible directions of the Earth's rotations? ?

Answer 1

The Earth's rotation on its axis, the Moon's rotation on its axis, the Earth's revolution about the Sun, and the Moon's revolution about the Earth are all counter-clockwise as viewed from a location above the North Pole. That is why the Sun and stars appear to rise in the east and set in the west, the Moon moves toward the east from night to night, and the constellations move toward the west from night to night.

Since angular momentun is conserved in accordance with Newton's Laws, these motions will not change unless some significant external force causes them to change. There is no evidence that there is any such force that is about to occur.  

Answer 2

Earth, as well as other planets in the solar system (except Venus and Uranus,) rotates (spins) and revolves (orbits the sun) in the counterclockwise motion. This has to do with formation of the solar system. According to the solar nebula hypothesis, a cloud of gas and dust (you did not think that space is really empty, did you? there is enough dust grains and gas in interstellar medium to form clouds and later stars) collapsed as a result of a shock wave passing from a nearby supernova. The center of the cloud rotated faster, gained mass, gravity, temperature, pressure, and finally formed a star – our sun (conservation of angular momentum, centripetal and centrifugal forces). The rest of the cloud, flatten by its fast rotation, formed the planets and the rest of the objects in our system. So as you can see, Earth did not have a say in the matter. Everything in the solar system had to rotate and revolve in the same direction unless a catastrophic event took place. Since young solar system had quite a chaotic motion, collisions of big objects were inevitable: such as protoplanets being struck by huge chunks of planetesimals (that what probably happened to Venus and Uranus - the protoplanets were tipped over and their rotations were altered). It also happened to Earth but on much smaller scale. As a result of the collision, we’ve got the Moon!

Answer 3

Only one - the rotation energy of Earth is really huge (2.58E29 J or 61.7 billion gigatons of TNT), so the direction can't just turn around without extremely large amounts of energy being unleashed.

But the direction is not perfectly constant: The Earth axis does rotate slightly, caused by sun and moon. But the cone, formed by this movement is very narrow. It is most important for changing the navigation stars over the centuries, as the Earth axis points at different stars in a 15765 year cycle.

Answer 4

the earth itself turns clockwise, and the moon orbits earth counter clockwise, and earth orbits the sun counterclockwise.

Answer 5

Earth's rotation is the rotation of the solid Earth around its own axis. The Earth rotates towards the east, which can be observed by orientation with a magnetic compass at sunrise. As viewed from the star Polaris, the Earth turns counter-clockwise