What would happen if the moon exploded?
The moon isn’t just an amazing face to gaze upon at night. Our moon, that’s orbiting earth, is the reason for tides, climate, atmosphere, and earth’s axis.
So what would happen if the moon disappeared or exploded after getting hit by a giant asteroid? Would we survive or not? Probably not.
Effects on Human, Animals & Birds
Firstly we would experience that “NIGHTTIME” would be darker as it used to be. Because the moon brightens up the sky at night by reflecting the sun’s light.
Without moonlight, an area that doesn’t have any artificial light would become riskier to travel.
According to Journal of Animal Ecology, some animals use vision as their primary mode of interacting with the world benefit from the moon’s presence. It’s not a surprising fact, but many predators, like owls, bats, and especially wild cats, such as Tigers, Lions and jaguars would have to face problems finding food.
Although they have six times sharper vision than a human at night, they still need moonlight.
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Effects on Oceans, Ecosystem & Climate
The Moon is the closest celestial body to the Earth. Although it doesn’t have stronger gravity as earth, but it’s gravity force is strong enough to pull our oceans back and forth, which we call “Tides.”
According to a NASA’s research, Matt Siegler, without moon, tides won’t stop moving completely because Sun’s gravitational force also affects our oceans, but not too strongly as moon, cause sun as is about 147.14 million km away from earth while moon is only 384,400 km away.
Almost two-thirds reduction in tides will highly affect coastal ecosystems, the flow of energy, water, minerals, and many other Important resources.
Unlike land, an entire ecosystem exists in the ocean between high and low tides and many species like crabs, snails, mussels, sea stars, barnacles, algae and kelp are dependent on daily coming and going of the tide.
This ecosystem feeds migrating and local birds and land mammals like raccoons, deer and bears.
According to Jack Burn, who’s a researcher from University of Colorado, tides movements help to drive ocean currents, which contribute to global weather, so without tides, regional temperature would be more extreme.
The Moon’s gravitational force is the reason for molecules movement in the atmosphere.
Jack Burn also stated that “Any planet outside of our solar system must have a good sized moon in order to have a weather system like Earth”
Siegler says. We’re lucky to have a moon, without it we’ll lose scientific information and source of information.
Without the moon earth’s axis would probably shift drastically over time, and in just a few hundred years we’ll experience an ice age.