Imagine that there was no water in the world

Imagine that there was no water in the world, that would mean no seas, no drinking water,
no water in foods. Just no water at all
It goes without saying that the human race wouldn’t last very long in a world without water.
The same can be said of all animals and plants, as well, since H2O constitutes one of the
building blocks necessary for life to thrive.

But what would happen to the planet itself? With no oceans, rivers or lakes, it would certainly
look altogether different, but in what other ways would it change? Here are a few possible
consequences if all of the water on our great green Earth vanished overnight.

Changing faces
For starters, it wouldn’t be quite so green for very long. With no water supply, all vegetation
would soon die out and the world would resemble a brownish dot, rather than a green and
blue one. Clouds would cease to formulate and precipitation would stop as a necessary
consequence, meaning that the weather would be dictated almost entirely by wind patterns.

Indeed, other than fluctuations in wind force, our climate would resemble one endless
summer – but not the shorts-and-t-shirt, holiday kind; the flesh-meltingly hot kind. The
oceans of the world constitute the biggest deposits of carbon (and recently it was found that
Arctic melting released nitrous oxides (NO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2), as well). With these
“sinks” gone, the greenhouse gases would have a field day and temperatures would spiral
out of control.

Of course, the absence of vegetation would contribute to the problem (since plants would not
be around to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into oxygen), thus exacerbating the situation.
Today’s climate change issues would seem small fry in comparison.

Less volcanoes, more mountains

Perhaps surprisingly, however, volcanic activity would decrease in the face of a water
dearth. Volcanos, supervolcanos and their eruptions are actually caused by tectonic plates
colliding with each other and running over one another – something which is generally
caused by the weight of oceans pushing one plate beneath another.

What’s more, once the volcano has been formed, water also plays an integral role in its
volatility. Liquid inside the Earth’s crust at high temperatures and high pressures becomes
magma, resulting in eruptions like the one at Vesuvius which did for poor old Pompeii.

Therefore, with no ocean to weigh plates down and no water to power eruptions, we’d be left
with a series of incredibly high mountain ridges any time two tectonic plates collided. Of
course, such a process would take millennia to occur, but the end result would be a desert-
like, barren globe populated by spiky ridges and gulfing chasms.

Let there be life

Remarkably, however, this wouldn’t mean the end of all life on Earth. Evolution has a funny
way of persevering even in the most difficult of circumstances, and over the millennia,
certain microbes known as “extremophiles” have evolved to be capable of life without water.

Instead, extremophiles harvest their nutrients from carbon monoxide (CO), meaning they
can thrive even in sizzlingly hot or acidic environments, without water or sunlight. Some of
them inhabit the Earth’s crust, while others are effectively dormant in a state of suspended
animation inside gigantic subterranean crystals.

So while humanity and the animal kingdom would most certainly snuff it, life would still find a
way.