Earth with No Moon Essay Example

Earth with No Moon Essay Example Earth with No Moon Essay Earth with No Moon Essay Earth with No Moon A world with no moon would be much different without the Moon. Without the moon, Earth would be greatly different. The length of the day would be different, the origins of life on Earth would be slowed, and the biological evolution of life on Earth would vary greatly. But there would still be life on Earth, and many things on Earth would remain the same. Lunar tides are perhaps the most obvious effect of the Moon on Earth. The Earth without the moon would have a day that was only about 8 hours long. Tides occur because the gravitational force between the two bodies decreases with distance. This is because the tidal effects of the moon cause the high tides to flow westward, where they eventually run into land masses, which are moving to the east because of the Earth’s rotation. This, ever so slowly, slows down the rotation of the Earth. Overall, this causes the day to get longer by . 002 seconds per century. Over a few hundred years this doesn’t mean much, but over billions and billions of years it adds up to about 18 hours added on to the day. The faster a planet rotates the faster winds it has. Because the Earth’s tides, caused by the Moon, slowly slow down the rotation of the Earth, the speeds of the winds on Earth have slowed down significantly. Day to day life on Earth would be much different without the moon. The day would most likely still be around 8 hours long, with about three to fours or sunlight per day. Tall life forms like trees could possibly be knocked down because of their lack of time to grow deep roots and the wind speeds of up to 100 miles per hour on Earth. Certain studies show that many creatures function on a biological clock with days around 25 hours. If these animals were living on an Earth with no Moon, then their clocks would be thrown off. They might be hunting when they should be sleeping, or be hunting while they should be mating, which would make them easy prey for more well adapted predators. The high lunar tides gave the oceans of Earth the chemicals needed to evolve under the Sun’s radiation. An Earth with no moon would receive the same radiation from the Sun, but the chemical building blocks of life in the oceans would take much, much more time to develop. The only way these chemicals would enter the oceans is through rivers running into the ocean, nd the rate of that is much slower than what the high tides do. So the life on Earth would take longer to evolve without a Moon and high tides. Even though there are many things that would be different on Earth if there was no Moon, there are also many things that are alike. In an extensive sense, since the formation of the Moon was after the formation of the Earth, th ere would still be an Earth if there was no moon. Secondly, we would still have waves in our ocean, which are caused by storms out at sea, and are turned in to larger waves because of their motion up a sloping beach, which we would also have without a moon. And lastly, we would still have tides. These tides would be caused by the Sun. They would be smaller than the lunar tides, but there would still in fact be tides on Earth because of the Sun. Overall, life on Earth would be much different without the Moon. The length of the day would be different, the origins of life on Earth would be slowed, and the biological evolution of life on Earth would vary greatly. But there would still be life on Earth, and many things about life would still be the same.