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I wonder how this affects human migration from Africa and cultural development. I'd imagine that our current landmasses are a lot more "appropriate". That is, all the wind and ocean and climate currents were instrumental in positioning continents and making the South Pole one singular mass.

No, because if our -axial tilt- was rotated by 90 degrees (113°), we would have some ridiculously bad weather patterns, horrific day-night cycles, and generally a bad time. At the poles, no sun for four months, then a four month sunrise, then all the sun for four months...

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was wider than any part of the ocean is deep and travelled at 45,000 miles per hour. It "landed" like a cannon ball fired vertically downwards into a kiddie pool. The surface below it wasn't a factor as it would have evaporated any water instantly.

That doesn’t make sense. The relationship between Florida (for example) and the Prime Meridian did not remain intact after the rotation whereas all the other locations maintained their relationship.

It's a weird trick of the projection, but if you look at the North Pole on a globe, with the Prime Meridian as the equator, then it really does look like that. The west coast and Mexico get squished a lot.

It does get rotated, it's just that a place like Oregon, at about 120 degrees west, is actually pretty closer to 180 degrees west (which is the new equator), it's not just distant from the prime meridian at 0 degrees longitude. The surface of a sphere is not a rectangle!

Yeah, it’s weird. It just gets rotated from the northern hemisphere to the southern. The northern 90 longitude keeps its orientation and slides straight south. It’s due to the choice of axis for the rotation.

We would have to call it “The gulf of sideways” But it really means we’re going down the toilet, no seriously grab a hold of a floater and hang on it’s going to be a wild ride! Axis Denied!

Something I wonder about a lot with climate change is how Alaska might be shaped by water over time. If we suddenly rotated 90 degrees as shown, my best guess is incoherent screeching.

let's ask instead: "What if a recurrent micronova blasted the earth into an axis shift every 12,500 years?" or "What if the Earth's poles are about to flip again?"

don't make a joke about it doing that four times a day don't make a joke about it doing that four times a day don't make a joke about it doing that four times a day don't make a joke about it doing that four times a day d'oh!

My thought process: "They rotated it at the prime meridian so that Britain gets to be on the equator, but that's arbitrary. What if they picked a different axis? Does it even have to go through the equator? You know, technically, it does rotate 90° every 6 hours...Phil Plait beat me to it!"