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What if Earth instantly lost all it’s oceans?

What If | September 12, 2026



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Earth’s sky has caught fire. And the thing that’s cooking it is hiding in this glass. It’s the very fuel that powers the stars. This IS happening to our planet… in about 5 billion years. OK, so it’s not happening tomorrow, but our Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen to fuse into helium.

It’ll enter its red giant phase and balloon outwards. Its surface will stretch out past Venus, right to our doorsteps. And it’s gonna get hot. That’s going to do a lot of things, including vaporizing our oceans. But what if it happened right now? What if the oceans boiled off the moment I snapped my fingers? How long until the sky caught fire?

00:00 What if the oceans exploded into the sky, and it caught fire?
02:05 Extreme Atmospheric Pressure & Crushing Gravity
03:42 Supercharging the Greenhouse Effect
04:42 Supercritical Water & The Draper Point
12:00 Kardashev Type 1 Civilization & Clean Energy
13:48 The Physics of Hydrogen & Red Giant Expansion
15:18 Earth’s Thermal Equilibrium & Molten Crust
18:40 Atmospheric Loss & Heavy Hydrogen (Deuterium)

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#earth #ocean #sun #fire #globalwarming #temperature #science

Written by What If

Comments

This post currently has 21 comments.

  1. @JLAvey

    September 12, 2026 at 11:31 am

    First thing I thought of was that without oceans, the new sea level is now 20k-25k below sea level, meaning sea level was now, at most, 25k feet above sea level, which means I'm living on the peak of K2 or Everest. Of course having the oceans vaporizing instantly, instead of being too thin, everyone would be crushed instantly.

  2. @kazeiku

    September 12, 2026 at 11:31 am

    I am requesting the What If 100 as my christmas gift 🙏🙂‍↕️🫶 I didnt know there was a book! I am not rlly good at keeping up with my fav channels' merch and stores. But now that I know, it is on top of my wishlist! I hope it wont sell out 🥺😬🙏❤️

  3. @JefferyMewtamer

    September 12, 2026 at 11:31 am

    Considering my understanding is that stars like our sun can only fuse the hydrogen in their cores and don't have nearly enough convection for surface hydrogen to get mixed into the core and go red giant not because they run out of hydrogen, but because their cores fill up with helium, what if we could swap the sun's core helium with it's surface hydrogen? How much could that extend the sun's hydrogen burning life?

    Also, if normal matter is currently 75% hydrogen, what percentage will be converted to helium by the time all existing stars end their hydrogen burnning life? And are Red dwarfs the only ones that will fully convert their hydrogen to helium?

  4. @ultrajd

    September 12, 2026 at 11:31 am

    If all of the world’s ocean water were to spontaneously evaporate, the oxygen level levels on earth would likely take a major dip. A lot of people don’t realize it, but we actually get the majority of our oxygen from the oceans and not the world’s forests and everything I mean yes we get a bunch of it from trees and stuff like that too, but the majority of it actually comes from the ocean.

    I can also tell you right now that when the sun enters its red giant phase, if humanity is still around when that happens. And if we haven’t like evolved or something hasn’t happened to make it so that we are living in a different planet or hell even a different galaxy at that point. In all likelihood humanity will die off long before the sons expansion reaches close enough to earth to begin cooking it. After all planet Earth, currently resides in an area known as “the habitable zone“ also called “the Goldilocks zone“ which is an area in our solar system where our planet is at just the right spot to basically have all of the right variables in just the right ratios to allow for complex cellular life to live.

    Theoretically speaking if this zone is shifted even just a tiny amount, it could have absolutely disastrous effects on the planet. It’s also theorized that this expansion that the sun will go through will not be instantaneous. It will probably take hundreds of thousands of years for all we know. Now we could be wrong obviously because again this is speculative science. But even so in all likelihood, any kind of complex life living on earth would be long dead by the time the sun reached its Apex of the red giant phase.

  5. @QuirkLens

    September 12, 2026 at 11:31 am

    One surprising correction: being “0.73” on the Kardashev scale doesn’t mean humanity is 73% of the way to Type I. We currently use only about 0.2% of the power a Type I civilization would. That finish line is much farther away than the video makes it sound.

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