Earth's rotation is the rotation of the solid Earth around its own axis. The Earth rotates towards the east. As viewed from the North Star Polaris, the Earth turns counter-clockwise.
The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. This is a different point than the Earth's North Magnetic Pole. The South Pole is the other point where the Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface, in Antarctica.
The Earth rotates once in about 24 hours from the point of view of the sun and once every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds from the point of view of the stars (see below). Earth's rotation is slowing slightly with time; thus, a day was shorter in the past. This is due to the tidal effects the Moon has on Earth's rotation. Atomic clocks show that a modern day is longer by about 17 milliseconds than a century ago, slowly increasing the rate at which UTC is adjusted by leap seconds.
Read more about Earth's Rotation: Changes in Rotation, Origin
Famous quotes containing the words earth and/or rotation:
“A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The lazy manage to keep up with the earth’s rotation just as well as the industrious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)