The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and former NASA Goddard Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue (@physicsJ) created another amazing video. He showed that what if we slowly drain the Earth’s oceans and see the two-thirds of Earth’s surface (that is currently under the oceans) we don’t get to see.
In other words, how our planet would look without water (spoiler: it definitely wouldn’t look like this).
Draining Earth’s oceans
The animation highlights the world’s longest mountain range, the Mid-Ocean Ridge (see notes 1 below), and the ice-age land bridges that ancient humans crossed, like the land bridge known as Beringia which became the Bering Strait after the ocean levels rose following the end of the last ice age.
For example, if the sea levels were just 50 meters (164 feet) lower, you could walk between France and England.
From the description of the old video:
Three-fifths of the Earth’s surface is under the ocean, and the ocean floor is as rich in detail as the land surface with which we are familiar. This animation simulates a drop in sea level that gradually reveals this detail. As the sea level drops, the continental shelves appear immediately. They are mostly visible by a depth of 140 meters (450 feet), except for the Arctic and Antarctic regions, where the shelves are deeper. The mid-ocean ridges start to appear at a depth of 2000 to 3000 meters (6560 to 9840 feet). By 6000 meters (19,685 feet), most of the ocean is drained except for the deep ocean trenches, the deepest of which is the Marianas Trench at a depth of 10,911 meters (35,797 feet).
Credit for files used:
Lead animator: Horace Mitchell (NASA)
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Geophysical Data Center, 2006, 2-minute Gridded Global Relief Data (ETOPO2v2) – The Blue Marble Next Generation data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC) and NASA’s Earth Observatory.
Related: “The Deep Sea”: life in the depth of the oceans – amazing animation by the young software developer Neal Agarwal showing the life in the depth of the oceans.
Related: “The Deep Sea”: life in the depth of the oceans – amazing animation by the young software developer Neal Agarwal showing the life in the depth of the oceans.
All the Earth’s oceans
Related: Oceans of the Solar System
Notes
1. Mid-ocean ridge
The mid-ocean ridges of the world are connected and form the Ocean Ridge, a single global mid-oceanic ridge system that is part of every ocean, making it the longest mountain range in the world. The continuous mountain range is 65,000 km (40,400 mi) long (more than nine times longer than South America’s Andes, the longest continental mountain range, which is 7,000 km / 4,300 mi long), and the total length of the oceanic ridge system is 80,000 km (49,700 mi) long.
Sources
- Mid-ocean ridge on Wikipedia
- All Moons in Our Solar System [2024 Update] - September 17, 2024
- Budget of NASA, Year by Year [1980-1989] - June 10, 2024
- Budget of NASA, Year by Year [1970-1979] - June 10, 2024
