What Earth Would Look Like If All The Oceans Were Drained

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We know that the world ocean is bottomless and that the deepest trench in the world has almost 11 kilometers. We also know that the world ocean covers about 70 percent of our planet, making more than 2/3 of Earth’s surface unseen to us. But assume we obtained a way to drain oceans of our world, what would Earth’s exterior look like, exactly?

Planetary scientist James O’Donaghue made the animation that shows what the planet would look like if the water level of the oceans fell from 0 meters below sea level to 10,190 meters below sea level.

The animation was remade from a NASA animation with the use of new satellite data. And as you can see from the video, when the water drops to around 150 meters below sea level, the continental shelves, the seabed surrounding large landmasses, are the first to appear.

The mid-oceanic ridges start to appear at a depth of two kilometers to three kilometers.

The mid-oceanic ridge system formed by plate tectonics is the most long chain of mountains on the Earth, covering nearly sixty-five thousand kilometers (40 thousand miles). Most of it (90%) is underwater. Watch for this pattern to begin appearing at around two thousand kilometers:

When the world ocean is dropped to around 6 kilometers below sea level, most of our planet’s surface can be observed, except some of Earth’s deepest ocean trenches, such as the Mariana Trench, which is around 11 kilometers in depth.

And at the end, one more image of the Earth without water, made by Anton Balazh.