In the 1989 Stone Roses song “What the World is Waiting For,” Ian Brown sings,

“Stop the world
Stop the world
I’m getting off

… I’m getting off

… Can’t get enough
I’m getting off.”

Now, you may have felt a shift recently in the direction of the planet but thought it was a bump in the road or maybe a dizzy spell of social imbalance, given the chaotic news cycle of late.

The earth may have stopped spinning. Well, not the entire world, just the core. Mr. Brown may yet have his opportunity to get off – the planet.

As reported by Becky Ferreira at Vice News, “Earth’s inner core has recently stopped spinning, and may now be reversing the direction of its rotation, according to a surprising new study that probed the deepest reaches of our planet with seismic waves from earthquakes. The mind-boggling results suggest that Earth’s center pauses and reverses direction on a periodic cycle lasting about 60 to 70 years, a discovery that might solve longstanding mysteries about climate and geological phenomena that occur on a similar timeframe and that affect life on our planet.”

This is not an unprecedented phenomenon, though it sounds pretty scary to me – which might be a testament to disaster films.

“Yi Yang  and Xiaodong Song, a pair of researchers at Peking University’s SinoProbe Lab at School of Earth and Space Sciences, have captured “surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s,” according to a study published on Monday in Nature Geoscience.”

Another explanation could be that the earth is finally responding to Superman’s successful turning back of time to bring Lois Lane back to life in the 1978 film.