Scenario:
We woke up to find that the ocean starts to mystifyingly drain at warp speed, it drains in a speed that it will completely drain the ocean in a month(The mysterious draining only happens to the ocean, other water sources will not drain)
Goal:
Survive to the utmost
Illustration of the earth with completely drained oceans
The Ocean is extremely crucial for living because it:
- Holds a voluminous 321 million cubic miles (1.38 billion cubic kilometres) of water
- Produces over half of the world's oxygen and absorbs 50 times more carbon dioxide than our atmosphere.
- Regulates our climate and weather patterns.
- Provides foods and ingredients
- Is important for the water cycle.
- Provides protein to nearly 3 billion humans and every plant, vegetable and animal has grown through access to water produced through the water cycle driven by the Ocean.
- Controls Global Climate, Plays an important role in the Earth's climate and in global warming.
- etc
Question: Given the amount of time before the ocean completely drains (1 month), what can we prepare to survive this as long as possible? (Using our current technology)
Water availability:
Citation from What-if:
If the ocean suddenly drained, the small amount of liquid left in lakes and rivers wouldn’t be enough to sustain the water cycle. The pools of drinkable water would evaporate pretty fast. In a matter of days, people and most animals would die from dehydration.
What can we do to preserve the rest of the waters and survive as long as possible?
One fact about earth's water: 2.5% of the earth's fresh water is not easily accessible, they are locked up in glaciers, polar ice caps, atmosphere, and soil. Some of them are highly polluted or lies too far under the earth's surface and will require loads of effort and money to extract.
More data about water distribution (excluding the ocean)
Water Source | Volume (Cubic miles) |
---|---|
Ice caps, Glaciers, & Permanent Snow | 5,773,000 |
Groundwater | 5,614,000 |
Soil Moisture | 3,959 |
Ground Ice | 71,790 |
Lakes | 42,320 |
Atmosphere | 3,095 |
Swamp | 2,752 |
Rivers | 509 |
Biological Water | 269 |
Oxygen availability:
50%-80% of the world's oxygen is produced by the ocean, well now its starting to disappear.... What can we do to preserve rest of the oxygen producers? How long can we survive with them?
What about the other factors? What can we do to preserve the rest of our alternative resources to stay alive?
Effect on gravity
The ocean accounts for 0.022 percent of the total weight of earth, weighing an estimated 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 short tons (1 short ton = 2,000lbs).
Oceans draining will cause the earth to lost this amount of mass which could also affect the gravity as gravity is a force and Force = Mass x Acceleration
Citation from Quora:
Scenario: Mass of earth is decreased by 10%
- Mass is reduced and the volume is also reduced. In this case I think the gravitational force of earth will also reduce will make everything on earth lighter. Average height of trees and may be animals will increase.
Now in this case, the ocean's mass is only a tiny bit portion of the total earth's mass(5.972 × 10^24)
Will the removal of this mass have any big effects on the earth's gravity or anything?
Extra question: If there is no way for us to survive this scenario, how much time do we have before everything completely dies?