Science & Technology

This is what Earth would be like without oceans

By T.K. Randall
February 3, 2020 ·  13 comments

Fortunately this is unlikely to ever actually happen. Image Credit: YouTube / Dr James O'Donoghue In recent years we've heard a lot about the potential for sea levels to rise due to global warming, but what would things be like if the opposite were to happen and the sea simply disappeared ?

In a recently updated version of a NASA simulation originally created by physicist and animator Horace Mitchell, planetary scientist James O'Donoghue, who now works at the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), has shown just what such a scenario might be like.

The footage shows what would happen if the oceans started to disappear, first exposing the hidden areas of land surrounding the continents and then moving on to the deeper parts of the sea.

Some of these areas of land were actually exposed relatively recently during the last ice age when a lot of the world's water was locked up in huge ice sheets. Some of our ancestors would have used these land bridges to spread to otherwise inaccessible parts of the world."I slowed down the start since, rather surprisingly, there's a lot of undersea landscape instantly revealed in the first tens of meters," said O'Donoghue.

"When the last ice age occurred, a lot of ocean water was locked up as ice at the poles of the planet. That's why land bridges used to exist. Each of these links enabled humans to migrate, and when the ice age ended, the water sort of sealed them in."

By the time the simulation reaches 10,000 meters below sea level, pretty much all the water has gone.

Fortunately though, such a scenario is incredibly unlikely to actually occur in real life.


Source: Science Alert | Comments (13)

Tags: Earth, Oceans