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PHAC warns of Salmonella outbreak affecting several provinces; no source confirmed. And what would allow our planet to regenerate itself naturally?
Ripping Earth in half might not mean instantaneous death for everyone on the planet. Instead, some people might be able to survive for a short while if they happened to be in the right place at the right time. How long would it be before the remaining humans start to turn on each other? It might start as just a bright light in the sky, something that you could quickly shrug off. As the Earth is methodically sliced in half, its mantle and core would be exposed to the vacuum of space, causing massive earthquakes that would be felt everywhere on the planet.
At this point, the death toll would already be in the millions. Those who are the furthest from the split would have the best chance of surviving the longest, at least from the initial earthquakes. Amidst all this chaos, people would be turning to their phones and social media for answers, but there would be none to be found. Frantic calls and texts would be attempted, but very few, if any, would make it through.
Power grids would fail as power stations sank into the ground. No power, no social media. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the earth stopped spinning?
ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results. The world as we know it. The obvious demarcation of land and ocean is indicated by the contour of 0 elevation.
The longer, equatorial axis of Earth's ellipsoid is more than The flattening of the ellipsoid shown on this map was intentionally exaggerated. The most significant feature on any map that depicts even a portion of the earth's ocean is the spatial extent of that water body. Typically, we do not pay much attention to the delineation of the sea because it seems so obvious and constant that we do not realize it is a foundation of geography and the basis for our perception of the physical world.
The line separating oceans from continents outlining the spatial extent of both land and water is the most fundamental contour. It is zero elevation because it signifies the sea level. Why is the sea level where we currently observe it? What controls the sea level? How stable are the forces that determine the sea level?
This article does not refer to the climate change and the potential increase of the water level in the global ocean but rather to the geometry of the globe and the powerful geophysical energies that determine where oceans lie. Sea level is—and has always been—in equilibrium with the planet's gravity, which pulls the water toward the earth's center of mass, and the outward centrifugal force, which results from the earth's rotation.
After a few billion years of spinning, the earth has taken on the shape of an ellipsoid which can be thought of as a flattened sphere. Consequently, the distance to the earth's center of mass is the longest around the equator and shortest beyond the polar circles.
The current difference between the average sea level as observed along the equator and the distance to the earth's center of mass from the sea level at the poles is about The gravity of the still earth is the strongest at the polar regions shown in green. It is intermediate in the middle latitudes and weakest at the high altitudes of the Andes, close to the equator. When global rotation stops, the massive oceanic water migration would cease and sea level would be at different locations, completely changing world geography.
What would happen if the earth's rotation slowed down and finally stopped spinning over a period of a few decades? ArcGIS lets us model the effects of this scenario, performing calculations and estimations and creating a series of maps showing the effects the absence of centrifugal force would have on sea level. If earth ceased rotating about its axis but continued revolving around the sun and its axis of rotation maintained the same inclination, the length of a year would remain the same, but a day would last as long as a year.
In this fictitious scenario, the sequential disappearance of centrifugal force would cause a catastrophic change in climate and disastrous geologic adjustments expressed as devastating earthquakes to the transforming equipotential gravitational state.
The new surface will have a gravitational acceleration of 9. The energy imparted to a 1 kg mass will then be mgh, or just about 10, kJ. The specific heat of granite is. Toss in a correction factor to allow for the decreased gravity at altitude above the new surface, and 9, to 10, degrees seems reasonable. In other words, the new sphere will be molten where it isn't gaseous. I've not included the energy required to separate the two halves, and this will mitigate the thermal effects some, but it still ought to be quite a show.
The inner core of the Earth is made of solid iron and nickel. Solid because the pressure is overwhelming; without the pressure, the temperature would make both metals - no, not liquid, gaseous. Take off the pressure, wich is implied in cutting the planet to half, and a monsterous eruption of iron gas takes place; with the core suddenly losing consistence, all the upper layers immediately crash down; the crust of the remaining half is destroyed in the process.
At the temperatures involved, iron and nickel burn. And then they cool down, and it rains Oceans boil, due to both increased temperature and reduced pressure. And no, it doesn't take years for all this to happen, or even months. It is an extinction level event up to eleven - I doubt even bacteria would survive the process. The end result is two smaller spheric, dead, sterile planets orbiting each other. Both violently whipped by solar wind, as their disrupted cores would quite certainly be unable to generate a magnetic field.
In this case, the point most distant from the edge of the cut is closer to the new gravitation center, and consequently everything falls towards it. Again, extinction-level event. OK again, the sufficiently technologically advanced - ie, magic - aliens can change the laws of physics in a way that the gravitational center of each semiplanet no longer coincides with its baricenter; somehow it remains in the flat surface of the hemisphere. And, as new difficulties are raised, the aliens counter-attack with newer magic - I mean, sufficiently technologically advanced - tricks.
You win; life is preserved in both semi-planets, and the main difference is that London-Sydney is now an interplanetary trip, not merely an international one. If we come to this point, then the question is: on what plane was the Earth cut by half? The Equatorial plane? The Eclyptic? Or along a meridian which one? According to that answer, we could have semiplanets where it is either summer in the whole surface, or winter. Which countries and oceans would be cut apart between semiplanets?
In the case of countries, how do split countries reorganise? New capital, new elections for president? Or just chaos? What resources become suddenly scarcer in each half? What happen to migratory species whose migration routes are severed? Do we discover that one of the halves, or both, is no longer a sustainable environment without the other half? And those poor Western corporations, how do they manage to stay afloat without Chinese sweatshops?
How do Muslisms fare in a half-world without Mecca or Catholics without Rome? If you put the planet in stasis, cut it in half, separated the two halves by a few thousand kilometers, and then set them spinning around one another and released them from stasis, what would happen is that the entire liquid mantle, super-hot and under immense pressure, would immediately and simultaneously boil and try to flow down towards the former center of the planet being the new surface of the half-planet and the new low point relative to the center of the half-mass in the largest lava flow seen since the moon was formed.
All of these trillions of tons of molten metal would be rushing down to the center, some of it falling literally thousands of kilometers, and then when it gets to the bottom, it would slam headlong into all the other magma coming up from the other direction.
So trillions of tons of boiling-hot metal are now slamming together at extremely high speeds.
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