A Princeton-led team has built a tabletop device that generates voltage directly from Earth’s rotation through its magnetic field. While the power output is orders of magnitude too small for practical electronics, the breakthrough suggests Earth’s spin could someday provide constant, fuel-free energy if the effect scales up. The team is now calling for independent labs to reproduce the results.
I suspect that before it starts to scale to the whole planet, you’d be stealing angular momentum from the tectonic plate specifically. Picture a sail on an ice floe, you’ll mess with the plate long before you have an impact on the vast body of liquid it’s sitting on.
So, at worst, lots of earthquakes and the like, not screwing up the day/night cycle.
Ah yes, so potentially planet bursts apart or at least there is some other horrifying cataclysm involving ever worsening earthquakes, or lessening which means pressure starts building up
Nah, Earth’s a giant blob of liquid with a thin skim of crust on the outer layer. If you apply a force that slows a portion of that crust, you’re not going to affect the spin of the blob - you’ll just push that part of the crust around a bit at most.
So apocalyptic earthquakes will shut this down long before you have any real effect on the day’s length. (And that’s a lot easier to recover from!)