What Would Happen If We Blew Up the Moon?
The Moon is the Tango to Earth’s Cash, the Hall to our Oates, the Lennon to our McCartney before they hated each other. Simply put, our planet and the Moon are soul mates: except, of course, if something were to happen to one of them. Like, I don’t know, what if we just blew up the Moon?
For this week’s Giz Asks, Gizmodo spoke to astronomers and planetary scientists about the ramifications of blowing up our beloved satellite. While the idea has been excellent fodder for sci-fi (hello, Neal Stephenson), it’s worth understanding what would actually happen if some madman decided to destroy the Moon. Just… don’t get any ideas, okay?
…snip…
Pamela Gay
Astronomer, writer, and Director of Technology and Citizen Science at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
How dangerous would it be for life on Earth if we exploded the moon?
There are times when we all say (jokingly), “And now, we are all going to die.” I know this is how I feel trying to cross the rush hour streets of Jakarta. While death is a possibility in these situations, it’s not certain or common.
If we were somehow to pump enough energy into the moon to make it explode, the correct response is a serious utterance of “And now, we are all going to die.” The moon is held together globally by gravity and on smaller scales by the chemical bonds that hold together boulders, rocks, and even grains of sand. If the moon were made to go Ka-Boom, the needed forces would send chunks of Moon flying at high velocities. Larger chunks would crater our world, while smaller chunks would burn up in the atmosphere.
In a weird case where only big chunks are created, some chunks would hit Earth and generate massive shockwaves, potentially global tsunamis, and would throw massive amounts of debris into the atmosphere. The impactors could leave boiling hot spots where bodies of water are involved.
While it may seem that debris (or smaller pieces of the moon) falling through the atmosphere shouldn’t be too deadly, this intuition is wrong. As high-speed material slows down in the atmosphere, [and] its kinetic energy gets turned into heat energy. The more stuff (either debris splashed up and falling down, or small moon bits falling) that goes through our atmosphere, the more heat goes into our atmosphere. At a certain point, our planet becomes a convection oven, and life outside of the oceans and not burrowed beneath the soil will be baked.
This is a bad way to die.
How would the tides be impacted if the moon exploded?
Taken semi-literally, the tides would be splashed to kingdom come.
Taken as intended, whatever bodies of water reformed as the Earth recovered from this devastating event would potentially be shaped by non-tidal forces – which would mean there would be no tides. It’s possible that some chunks of the exploded Moon and tossed up debris could reform into a new, smaller object, and this would, in turn, drive new tides that had times dictated by the new moon’s orbital period, and heights dictated by that new moon’s size and distance from Earth.
Read more at Gizmoda