What Would Happen If The Sea Suddenly Dried Up? | Unveiled

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What Would Happen if the Sea Suddenly Dried Up?</h4>

What do you think of first when you picture the sea? The crashing waves; the sandy beaches along the shore? Perhaps you think of the animals? The fish and ocean creatures that combine to form one of the most diverse environments on planet Earth. Or maybe your mind goes to the boats and ships that sail with the tides? Here, it’s a world all of its own… but what if it all suddenly disappeared? 

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what would happen if the sea suddenly dried up?

The land on Earth may well be home to more than eight billion people (and rising) but, actually, the majority of this world is water. Some seventy-one percent of our planet’s surface is covered in water, and around ninety-seven percent of that is the sea. These vast expanses of ocean had, for thousands of years, been so unimaginably big that many believed that their horizons just went on and on forever. Until, with the age of exploration, humans came to realize the true shape and scale of the waters before them. Although, we also know that what we have now wasn’t always the way it was. In the days of the supercontinent Pangea, for example - up to around 200 million years ago and pre the Jurassic period - the land was surrounded on all sides by an equally unbroken sea, a superocean known as Panthalassa.

Today, there are five major regions of the sea on Earth; the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic Oceans. In all, seawater covers almost 140 million square miles, with a total volume of about 330 million cubic miles. From the surface all the way down to the darkest, deepest parts of the seafloor… that is a serious amount of water! And, thankfully, there’s nothing that could actually happen in real life (or, at least, nothing that we ourselves would survive to see the end of) that really could suddenly dry it all up. But, given the sheer enormity of the numbers involved, and imagining an until-now unknown mechanism that perhaps could (somehow) force it to happen… then what would happen next, if the sea was suddenly no more? How would life be different in this ocean-less alternate world?

The first and most obvious change is that issue of travel. Without the sea, everything is land… which means you could, technically, walk to anywhere on Earth. A journey to Europe from America, for example, would simply be a very long trek across what was once the Atlantic seabed. Would America or Europe still begin and end where they do today, though? Not likely. The eastern seaboard of the USA - from northern Maine to southern Florida - would lose all its shape in a sea-free time. The Portuguese coast and southern Spain would now merge with Morocco and northern Africa. Ireland, the UK, France, Scandinavia, the rest of mainland Europe… all of it would now exist on the same, unending stretch of land. If you really wanted to, you could walk from northern Canada to the southern reaches of Australia, or to the places that once were the islands of Japan, all without ever encountering water in your way.

If you were to take that trip, though, the unfortunate truth is that it would be hellish to the extreme. Without the ocean and (presumably) without the rivers that formerly ran into the ocean, there’s naturally no water cycle. In turn, that means no rain, or clouds, or storms. With little-to-no water on the ground, there’d be precious little water churning through the atmosphere… and, without that, life itself would come under immense, almost certainly terminal strain. It would be a world something akin to Frank Herbert’s “Dune”. Without the sea, Earth dries to a crisp. The freshly exposed grounds burn and crack. The trees that once grew there, die. The lush potential for life on planet Earth is really all down to the water we have here, the very vast majority of which is carried in the ocean. Without it, most plants, animals, even fungi and bacteria would shrivel and choke their way to oblivion. Maybe some of the hardiest organisms around - like tardigrades - might manage to survive. But their new existence would be more like living on an alien planet than the one we know.

As they are, the oceans also operate as massive carbon sinks… so we’d lose that functionality, as well. As it is, the sea plays host to a crucial arm of the carbon cycle that’s at once astoundingly complex and beautifully simple. Tiny plankton and algae take carbon from the atmosphere, and are then eaten by their predators, which are then eaten by their predators, and so on. The carbon passes through the chain, while also being regurgitated as waste product along the way. And, like life-enabling clockwork, it ends up sinking to the bottom of the sea itself. Moving from the top to the bottom, and buried by the sheer might and depth of the ocean, while it’s below the waves the carbon isn’t clogging up the environment above sea level. But, when “sea level” is no longer a thing, because the sea period is only a memory… then it’s another vital mechanism that would very quickly fail and disappear. Similarly, as the ocean is crucial for absorbing solar energy, too, there’d be nothing left to keep that in check either… leading to a hotter and hotter, more combustible world, with fires sparking everywhere. 

What wouldn’t disappear, at least at first, are the animals that once lived in the sea. And here’s where this scenario gets especially grim. Dead and dying creatures, as far as the eye can see. To the point where, take that hypothetical walk from Canada to Australia, or Japan, or anywhere, and you could well be wading through a seemingly bottomless graveyard. While estimates vary, it’s thought that there are well over 220,000 known species living in the ocean… with perhaps two million or more undiscovered. Many are single or simple-celled organisms like bacteria, while many others are multi or complex-celled creatures, like fish and shellfish… all the way up to the blue whale. Without the ocean, they all perish. Then again, without the water and carbon cycles that the oceans facilitate, so does everything else, as well. Land or sea, it’s total death and decay.

Could humans survive? In a word, no. Not unless we ourselves are wholly different beings at the time of this alternate landscape. As CO2  levels soar, oxygen becomes scarcer and scarcer. Without the sea, we wouldn’t be able to breathe. Without water in general, we’re very quickly doomed. Perhaps, if we were to grow to have full and total mastery over subatomic particles… some kind of water-on-demand capability would still be possible. But, to our eyes, in the modern day, it would be nothing short of a superpower. Maybe the more likely scenario would be that future, alternate humans could evolve to be less dependent on water, to begin with. And, one way of achieving that could be to mechanize ourselves away from the frailties of an organic body. Artificial body parts; digitally enhanced brains; suspended animation until the oceans replenish. Of course, failing all of that, we could also opt for that favorite solution for sci-fi immortality, a digital consciousness. Although, quite how the servers to hypothetically house us would be maintained… on a barren husk of a planet with no-one to watch over them… is anyone’s guess.

But, for now, let’s just be grateful that this is something which (again) won’t actually transpire in real life. The seas aren’t going to suddenly disappear; you’re not going to wake up tomorrow without an ocean. However, that’s not to say that our waters will be here forever. Because, in fact, most models for the far, far future do predict that Earth will one day be ocean-free… perhaps in a couple billion years or so when, on its way to becoming a red giant, the sun will expand and ruthlessly burn and boil all before it, including us. Perhaps our now comfortable atmosphere will be the first part of this place to fully disintegrate, and then the oceans will siphon off into space, leaving us to go the way of Mars… which, interestingly, researchers do believe may have once hosted water (and seas) of its own, a long time ago. But, even then, a red giant apocalypse won’t be sudden. It’ll be drawn out and horrible, which is why we can only hope that humans (by then) will have had the good sense to leave Earth completely, in favor of someplace new.

If nothing else, this is a question that puts firmly into perspective just how precious our oceans really are. Without them, we’d be gonners. Without them, there’s no rain, far less oxygen, a fatal buildup of carbon, and life would almost certainly die. You could walk to pretty much anywhere, but you sure wouldn’t want to. And that’s what would happen if the sea suddenly dried up.