• Question: If everyone in the world jumped at the same time, would the planet shake?

    Asked by 962curm44 to Daniel, Fiona, Hazel, Jacque, K, Matthew on 14 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: K Sasitharan

      K Sasitharan answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      We could move the earth little bit. There were in-fact some calculations related to this done by a physicist called Rhet Allian.

      But our jump (7 billion people jumping at the same time) would push the earth so slightly that it’s almost negligible to the actual size of the earth
      Which is why the move would neither be felt not significant.

      Also Diego gravity, we are definitely going to come back to the ground at the end of the jump and the Earth might move back.

    • Photo: Hazel Gibson

      Hazel Gibson answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      This is an interesting question, as far as I can tell it is unlikely that we would make much of an impact – especially if we just all jumped up and down at the same place where we are right now, distributed across the face of the Earth. You may have heard that the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan was so large that it made the day shorter, but even that was only by 1.8 microseconds and it was a magnitude 9 earthquake! Much more interesting to me is how on earth you would co-ordinate everyone on earth to jump up and down at the same time – its practically impossible to get even a classroom of people to do this and you would only get one shot to get it right!

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