Oceans cover most of our planet, including the longest mountain range in the world and "bridges" through which our distant ancestors could move from one continent to another. All these objects and territories are not visible to us under the water column, but recently, NASA space agency employees published a video in which all this was clearly shown. The author of the video is planetary scientist James O'Donoghue, who decided to show what our planet would look like if there was no water on it. Apparently, it would remotely resemble Mars, but water on Earth is unlikely to disappear in the near future, because, on the contrary, it becomes more due to a gradual increase in air temperature and melting of glaciers.
The published video was featured in Business Insider. In fact, the original video was created back in 2008 by Horace Mitchell, who worked for NASA as a physicist and animator. Planetary scientist James O'Donoghue only slightly tweaked the animation speed and added an indicator of how much water disappears during the course of the video. This made the video even more informative, because thanks to the slow-motion action, we can see what was almost imperceptible before.
Planet earth without water
In the first minutes of the video, as the oceans gradually begin to dry up, we can see the underwater edges of each continent, which are also known as continental shelves. According to James O'Donoghue, he slowed down the initial section of the video precisely because he wanted to show the disclosure of the remaining edges of each continent under water.
Some continental shelves were once upon a time land "bridges" through which ancient people moved from one continent to another. For example, tens of thousands of years ago, our distant ancestors had an excellent opportunity to quickly move from continental Europe to Great Britain or from Siberia to Alaska. Also, the ancient inhabitants of Australia could easily move to the islands surrounding the continent without building floating facilities.
The ancient inhabitants of Australia were able to freely move around the neighboring islands.
Promotional video:
James O'Donoghue explained that such land bridges used to exist thanks to frozen water during the Ice Age. Once this period passed, the water began to melt and the easy passages between the continents disappeared. It turns out that if the temperature of our planet continues to rise, in the future we may lose the passages between the continents that we have at the moment.
Also in the video you can see the so-called mid-ocean ridge. This network of ridges stretches for 60,000 kilometers around the globe, with over 90% of its area hidden under water. You can see that almost all ridges are located in the central parts of all oceans.
If you follow the scale of the depth of the oceans added to the video, you will notice that after the disappearance of 6,000 meters of water, almost all the water disappears. But in order for it to completely disappear, you need to wait for the disappearance of about 5000 meters that fill the Mariana Trench.
Author: Ramis Ganiev