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Asked by 322tema29 to Pierre, Lisa, Kate, Jos, Joe on 13 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by jacob.
Question: Could you predict when the world will end using your scientific knowledge? e.g when will the polar caps melt?
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Kate Dobson answered on 13 Nov 2014:
Predicting the end of the world….. that’s a tricky one.
Melting the ice caps won’t mean the world will end. If all the ice in all the world melted it would raise the ocean level by a whopping ~65 m (70% of all the fresh water on Earth is locked up in Antarctic ice). There is a cool map here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map that shows you what the world would look like if the sea rose by that much.
However, most scientists working in that area generally think that the melting that might happen because of climate change will lead to sea level rises of between 15 sm and 1 meter. The antartic Ice cap has survived much warmer temperaratures than climatologists predict for the near future.
The thing that will finally “do” for the Earth will be the same thing that keeps it habitable now, the sun. Eventually the sun will burn up all it’s fuel. Before it reaches the end of its life and cools down, it will expand and get hotter and that will burn off all the water from the surface of the earth.
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Joe Reed answered on 14 Nov 2014:
Another big threat to humanity is asteroids, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. On average a mass-extinction sized asteroid hits Earth every few tens of millions of years and we are overdue one.
Luckily NASA are looking for them. Unluckily, since most of them are black, they are very hard to find. -
Lisa Simmons answered on 15 Nov 2014:
I really don’t know the answer to this, and to be truthful I’d rather not know. Although as a scientist we’re always trying to understand things, for me this is one of those things that I don’t want to know 🙂
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