The pressure of living on a spinning planet

This almost seems like a force, doesn’t it, something pushing the air around? In many ways it does act like a force, though it depends on whether you’re looking at it from the ground, rotating with the Earth, or from space, watching the Earth spin beneath you. This whole thing was first figured out in detail by Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis in the 1800s, and we name it after him: the Coriolis effect (or, sometimes, the Coriolis force).