James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, who is also a NASA collaborator, just published an improved version of a timelapse showing how the Earth would be affected if we gradually lost everyone’s water. the oceans of the planet . The video, the first simulation of which was created in 2008, showed a drop of ten meters by ten meters and how the Earth would look as the sea level dropped and different parts of the world were exposed.
With the new timelapse we can see in just a few seconds how the face of the Earth could change if the oceans suddenly dried up.
The withdrawal of the waters of the terrestrial oceans would cause the appearance of 70% of the surface of the planet that is currently submerged, revealing mountain ranges and canyons hidden until now, and a dark depth of up to 6,000 meters below the level of the oceans.
How would cities be affected after this apocalyptic scenario?
With a large rise in sea level, the large metropolises would be the most affected by floods and sea level rise, basically because they are located, for the most part, near the coast.
With a much more dramatic scenario, in which the Earth would be devoid of water, less than 200 meters deep almost all the coastal areas of the Earth would be exposed and 3 kilometers below the current level even the oceanic ridges would be seen.
In the timelapse animation also published on Twitter, O’Donoghue comments that he had already worked on this animation in 2008, but now he presented it with a new version, in high resolution and improved in several aspects.
“Emptying the oceans reveals submerged mountain ranges and canyons,” O’Donoghue wrote on his Twitter account. “It also shows where the bridges of the Earth were connected during the ages of the glaciers. Britain, for example, was less inclined to Brexit,” the scientist commented wryly.
As we can see on the map without oceans, the British Isles are more connected to the rest of the European continent than ever.
The characteristic brown color of dry land advances rapidly in the video, while the blue of the seas fades as the waters descend more than 6,000 meters below the current water level.
If we focus on Europe we can see that the first of the seas to disappear would be the Adriatic Sea, followed by the waters that surround Sicily and Sardinia.
The model presented by O’Donoghue reaches almost 11,000 meters deep, precisely where we run into the deepest point on the planet, the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific Ocean.
Be that as it may, although the video is still striking and interesting, the Earth’s water is far from being reduced because, as a large number of studies have already warned, the rise in sea level does not stop accelerating, even more so Following new research published in the journal Nature in which Greenland is exposed, it is losing ice at a rate seven times faster than in the 1990s.
In perspective
O’Donoghue has several animations of this style on his YouTube channel, about Jupiter, Saturn or one in which he illustrates the ability of light to travel distances according to its speed and the space traveled.
