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Physics LibreTexts

46: The Coriolis Force

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Imagine you're on a rotating merry-go-round, and you throw a ball to another person who's on the opposite side of the merry-go-round. If you aim directly at the other person, you'll miss them - the ball will travel in a straight line relative to the ground, but the merry-go-round will have rotated during the time the ball is in the air. Relative to the merry-go-round, the ball will appear to move along a curved path. You can attribute this curvature to a "fictitious force" called the Coriolis force.


46: The Coriolis Force is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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