• Question: what would happen if we had no moon?

    Asked by kirsty120298 to Jo, Mark, timcraggs on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hiya kirsty120298 🙂 Great question!

      To start with, the spin of the earth would be must faster because the moon’s gravity pulls on us. We’d therefore have no tides. Without a moon, our days would be really short…. about less that half they are now.

      Also our weather would be like that of a gas giant, such as Jupiter. Storms rage for weeks there and would wreak havoc with out world.

      The moon is a good thing… it might not seem like it has much of a purpose but take it away and life would really change 🙂

    • Photo: Mark Lancaster

      Mark Lancaster answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      A few things – the moon controls the ocean’s tides and without the moon we wouldn’t have tides and the water in the oceans would be redistributed toward the polar regions. The moon also stabilises our climate
      since it moderates the earth’s wobble as it rotates around the sun – without the moon the earth would wobble more around its axis of rotation and this would cause more dramatic changes in climate over the year then we have now and likely would be so severe to limit the types of life possible.

      On a scientific level the moon was the first thing we studied in astronomy and helped us get our scales right e.g. determining the size of the earth and its distance from the sun. The cold-war quest to land humans on the moon also advanced technology far quicker than would have happened otherwise

    • Photo: Tim Craggs

      Tim Craggs answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi Kirsty,

      There would be less werewolves! But seriously, I think the biggest difference we would notice on earth, apart from a big gap in the sky of course, would be that the tides in the sea would be almost completely gone. No more high and low tides! I say almost completely, because the gravity of the sun and the other planets has a very small effect on the tides too, and that effect would still be there, but the tides would be almost impossible to notice.

Comments