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Asked by nyancatman111 to Simon, Laura, Hannah, Christian, Angus on 20 Jun 2013.
Question: What would happen if the world lost it's atmosphere?
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Angus Ferraro answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Pretty much everything would die! We need to the atmosphere to live. It provides us with oxygen to breathe, but also many other things. It shields us from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and it also traps some heat through the greenhouse effect. Without the atmosphere the Earth’s surface temperature would be about -20 degrees!
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Laura Roberts Artal answered on 20 Jun 2013:
The atmosphere does a number of things: it protects us from harmful radiation from the sun, (UV radiation, the one that makes you tan), it stops temperatures from varying to much between day and night and it warms the surface of the Earth by trapping heat in, rather than letting it escape out to space.
If Earth lost it’s atmosphere, we would be exposed to really high levels of UV light, which would not be very pleasant at all for humans. It would also mean that Earth would be really cold at night, but really warm during the day. These extreme temperatures would make it difficult for us to survive.
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Simon Holyoake answered on 20 Jun 2013:
the oceans would boil away almost instantly due to the lack of air pressure (water boils at lower and lower temperatures as air pressure decreases) almost everything would die off quite quickly for the reasons outlined by Angus and Laura!
If we did not have a magnetic field surrounding the earth, this is a very real possiblity, the sun emits bursts of highly charged particles which would rapidly strip away the atmosphere if the magnetosphere didn’t deflect them (this happened to mars in the past, when mars lost its magnetic field, there was nothing to protect it from the sun!)
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