All buildings would collapse. And not just the buildings – all the people, trees, cars and animals would also go flying off the tangent, crashing to the surface and shattering to smithereens. This would happen because of a phenomenon of physics called inertia of bodies: everything that exists on Earth, including the air, rotates along with the planet. Therefore, if the globe suddenly stopped rotating, these bodies, by inertia, would tend to maintain their trajectory at the same speed. This is what happens in a car accident, for example. If a car hits a pole, all occupants are thrown forward. Imagine the result of a jolt of the Earth, whose rotation speed is 1675 kilometers per hour at the height of the equator (at the poles it is slower). What’s worse is that after the interruption it would probably be impossible to continue living here. Without rotation, the side of the planet facing the Sun would become a desert with very high temperatures, and the other side, always in the dark, would be so cold that an ice crust would quickly form. If that happened, all life would go extinct. Not to mention that the thermal difference between the two sides would cause terrible winds.
Read too:
– What kind of satellites orbit the Earth?
– Can the interior of the Earth cool completely?
– How many human beings would planet Earth be able to support?