what causes the earth to rotate?
448217
It goes back to when the solar system was formed.  The sun (and the planets, for that matter) were formed when a gigantic cloud of gas and dust collapsed.  When that cloud collapsed, it had something called 'angular momentum', which really just means that it was spinning a little bit.  When a large, slowly spinning thing collapses to something smaller, the rate of rotation speeds up (think about an ice skater that pulls her arms in...she spins up!).  Anyway, so now we have all this gas and dust in a disk that's orbiting the new Sun.  The dust eventually forms into planets.  As the dust collapses into new planets, the same thing happens, and the planets start spinning themselves.  So basically, the earth and moon and whatnot spin because of angular momentum.  I hope this made sense/helped!
739091
because the earth rotates on an axis
934445
A molten core of super heated metal (believed to be Iron and Nickel) is spinning at the center of the earth faster than the exterior of the earth is rotating.\n\nCharged Particles create a magnetic field when they move.
611229
Due to the direction of rotation of the earth, remember the sun is not actually moving at all we are rotation and rotating around the sun (days, years).  Galilao got into a lot of trouble with the vatican to teach us this :)
40541
It can! Actually Earth's rotation is slowing by about 2.2 seconds every 100,000 years. The massive earthquake that recently caused the disastrous tsunamis around the Indian Ocean slowed Earth's rotation by a few micro-seconds. Don't worry, though, long before Earth stops spinning, our Sun will have left its current stable condition and engulfed the planet--in about 4.5-billion years.
316427
None specifically. \n\nAll celestial bodies rotate.  The earth is no different.
438984
Minimally, 2.  Depending on how simplisticly we are thinking about the problem.\n\n1) the Earth rotates around it's axis\n2) the Earth revolves (orbits) around the sun\nhttp://www.ucolick.org/~bolte/AY4_00/week1/motionsC.html\n\nMaximally: ???\n3) the Earth and Moon really form a system together which revolves around the sun so there is the wobble attributable to that interaction.\nhttp://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=slv1-&p=earth%20moon%20system%20motion\n\n4) the Earth precesses about it's axis changing the tilt relative to the orbital plane\nhttp://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/time/precession.html\n\n5-14) Perturbations in Earth's motion due to gravitational pull from other planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto, UB313).\n\n15) Solar system motion through the Milky Way galaxy which brings the Earth along with it\n\n16) Motion of Galaxy through the universe bringing along the solar system and earth.\n\n17) Changes in motion due to sloshing of the oceans and earthquakes.\n\n...
755454
I answered this yesterday, but...\n\nWhat makes the Earth Spin...\n\nAngular Momentum. Think of a figure skater pulling their arms closer to their body while spinning, sudennly they are spinning VERY fast, then they let their arms out, and they slow down. This is because the arms still have the same amount of rotational energy as they did when they were further from the body, but when they are pulled close, they don't have as far to go to complete one rotation... the radius and circumference are smaller but the distance covered is the same over the same amount of time. This means faster rotation.\n\nHow does that have anything to do with the Earth? Simple. When the Earth formed, it formed by collecting bits of matter from space, and these bits of matter, ranging from dust to huge asteroids and larger, were all like tiny arms, adding rotational energy to the earth as they came in closer and stuck. \n\nRight now, the moon is slowing the earth's rotation as it slowly moves away from the Earth--again, this is the same process. How can this be when the moon doesn't even touch the Earth? Gravity. Gravity makes the earth and moon behave almost as if they were touching. The short explanation is that the center of gravity of the earth-moon system lies just below the surface of the earth, causing tides. Since the moon is moving away, it requires less orbital velocity to maintain it's orbit, and so the tides slow the earth more as the moon's orbital speed slows.\n\nEventually, the earth and Moon may both be tide-locked to each other, and this will happen long before the earth is tide locked to the sun (the tides have slowed rotation of the earth to the point where it always has one side facing the moon (or sun)).\n\nWhat makes the earth not stop spinning?\n\nAs mentioned before, angular momentum. The earth's surface can be slowed, but that energy has to go somewhere--it goes to speeding up the orbital velocity of the moon, which is why the moon is moving further from the earth...\n\nThe earth is moving around the sun because of the way the sun and all the other stuff in the solar system formed--from a cloud of gas and dust that collapsed into a spinning disk. The mechanics of the whole thing is still being learned and debated. As long as the Earth keeps moving in a straight line perpendicular to a line drawn between the Earth and the Sun, the Earth will continue to fall toward the Sun (by gravity) at exactly the same speed that it is flying perpendicular, and thus, like a ball on a string, it will follow a curved path around the sun.
862988
Earth and the other planets were formed from a giant cloud of gas and dust revolving around the primitive sun. As in any other moving fluid, local whirlpools kept appearing and disappearing all the time. \nAs the cloud started to cool, local perturbations caused density variations : some whirlpools got lumpier than others, just as in a bowl of porridge when it cools off. They thus grew more stable and accumulated more matter because of their increasing gravity. On further cooling, these separated out as planets, molten globes of matter still spinning furiously.\nEven when the planets solidified at last, they retained a part of their original spin. That's why the Earth and the other planets are still spinning around their axes. That's what, thankfully for us, creates days and nights.
199932
The earth's rotation.
8313
No, and the Earth won't rotate 'backwards', but if it did, it would be a global disaster. The spin of the earth slightly counteracts gravity, so if the earth stopped and turned around, the tsunamis, earthquakes, and global havoc would be immense.
608387
The Earth's center contains a lot of molten iron; due to Earth's rotation, it rotates too, thus generating a magnetic field. It's bit more complicated, but in a nut that's the explanation.
736239
rotation of earth causes days and nights and also effect in high tides and low tides across the seas.\n\nrevolution of earth result into years and centuries.\n\none rotation of earth take  24hrs=1day\none revolution takes 365 days
341487
The sun rotates approximately once for every 27 Earth rotations.  Unlike the Earth, because the sun is gas, it does not rotate at the same rate at all locations.  If the Sun were to stop rotating, it would probably collapse inward possibly resulting in an enormous explosion as the particles within the core became superheated.
122865
The gravitational pull of the earth pulls the waves up and down while the earth is rotating.
388209
For years it was thought that in the case of Venus that the Earth was the culprit. It is a curious fact that as Venus rotates three times on its axis in 729.27 days, the Earth goes twice around the Sun ( 728.50 days) This has suggested to many dynamicists that Earth and Venus are locked into a 3:2 tidal resonance. There are many bodies in the solar system that seem to be locked into various kinds of spin-orbit resonances, especially families of asteroids with the planet Jupiter. Mercury also seems to be gravitationally locked into some kind of resonance with the Sun since its day (58.646 days) and its year ( 87.969 days) are also in the proportion of 3:2. \n\nwhat happened in essence is that venus spins once a year which is about zero rotation in the normal planetary sense.  evidently the way the solar system formed it just sucked the spin out of venus.  that probably accounts for why it's a greenhouse.
414963
You may be referring to the Coriolis Effect, which governs the rotation of very large fluids (like weather systems on earth), due to differential forces caused by the rotation of the Earth.  In a relatively small object like a pipe (or yes, even a toilet) the direction of rotation is either random or determined by the geometry of the object.