No, we're not talking Tolkein and the Hobbits. We're talking about the middle of Earth the planet, and how dizzy just thinking about planetary motion can make you.

The Earth is in constant motion, in several ways. As part of the galaxy, it orbits the sun. As an individual body, it spins while rotating. Why does it rotate, you ask? We're going to tell you! Because all matter rotates. Just because you cannot see the pencil on your desk spinning, does not mean its atoms don't.

In the beginning, when explosions of matter began to coalesce into clouds, each particle was spinning at a relatively slow rate while separated from other particles. As they moved towards each other, and began to form masses, the momentum of each, contributed to the speed of the whole, and they began to spin a little faster.

This explains why the Earth spins. But it doesn't explain why it spins faster at the equator, than it does at say, the North Pole. The answer is fairly simple though, if you think about it.

The Earth has an axis around which all matter spins. If it didn't spin in unison, we'd be a pretty mixed up mass of atoms. Things at the North or South Pole, are naturally closer to that axis than something at the equator, the Earth's broadest point. Anything spinning around the middle is going to have a lot further to travel, and the only way to keep pace with the rest of Earth's mass, is to spin faster.

Scientists have clocked the Earth's rotational speed at the equator, as being 1,038mph. But halfway between the equator and the North or South Pole, that speed drops to 700-900mph.