But volcanic activity might increase as a result of unloading the crust. I just wanted to ad a few items on the list, mostly to make us think about how important oceans are. No more fish is one consequence. Oceans are made with water, which is the only liquid which does not freeze except on a thin surface, due to the reliquefaction of the ice below provoked by the weight of the ice above. This ensures that oceans act as regulators of the climate.
They are warmer than the ground in winter, cooler in summer. With no ocean, we would freeze. With it's mass changed, the earth would be knocked out of its orbit and would end up farther away.
What would happen if the oceans dried up? The image is a fascinating look at the nature of our planet. We know that Mars was once a much wetter and warmer place than it is now. The Mars Ocean Hypothesis shows that almost one-third of Mars was once covered in oceans. The oceans are gone, but we still have some water. Let's take stock. Ice caps, lakes and rivers which now flow to vast expanses of soil and underground water are still available.
Added together, those sources total about 3. That's not enough to get a decent worldwide water cycle going, even if we melted the ice caps. About Without clouds forming over the ocean, rain would be incredibly rare, and the planet would become desert. We'd watch our lakes and water supplies dwindle a little more every year until nothing was left.
Humans might survive for a while near our homes. We still would have access to groundwater and might get some underground hydroponic farms working. But on the surface, plants and animals would begin to dry out immediately. While trees can survive for a while without water, eventually everything would become so dry that fires would span the continents.
This would be a multifaceted problem for humans: Aside from the usual problems associated with fire such as burning to death , the blazes would release tons of carbon dioxide into the progressively stifling atmosphere, accelerating global warming. The sun would continue to pound the equator, turning it into a furnace with no relief from circulating ocean currents. Meanwhile greenhouse gases from the world's fires would trap the sun's energy close to the ground.
Some difference in temperature between night and day would create high- and low-pressure systems and produce wind, but the average temperature on Earth would be degrees Fahrenheit, making surface life impossible for even the hardiest desert animals [source: Philander ].
People would have to move. Humanity's only hope would be the window when the Antarctic ice sheet was still intact, prompting massive migrations to the Southern Hemisphere. A slightly less extreme variation of this theory, known as Slushball Earth , explains how life on Earth could have survived such a scenario. But neither reveals how the water that covers most of our planet might one day disappear for good.
By then, our aging sun will have swelled into a red giant, times its size. But , humans will almost certainly be long gone by then. Many scientists believe that the sun, in its own death throes, will torch our planet and then engulf it, before collapsing into a white dwarf.
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