Get ready for some serious burns
and the instantaneous
death of organisms.
Let’s turn up the heat
and bring the entire planet to a boil
for five whole seconds.
While you might complain about
roasting in the blistering
heat of a summer day,
the average temperature on Earth
is around 13.9 °C (57 °F).
Compare that to the hottest places
on the planet,
like China’s Flaming Mountains
or Iran’s Lut Desert,
which have recorded
land temperatures
around 70 °C (158 °F).
That’s still not nearly as hot as
a cup of boiling hot tea.
Water reaches
its boiling point at 100 °C (212 °F).
This is the point where liquid water
turns into water vapor.
With 71% of the Earth’s surface
covered in water,
life is about to feel
like you’re stuck inside
one giant kettle.
If temperatures suddenly spiked,
you wouldn’t necessarily
need to worry about everything
going up in flames.
At least not right away.
Wood ignites at around 300 °C (572 °F).
And while you could be imagining
that all the water in the oceans
would suddenly boil away,
don’t worry, that wouldn’t happen either.
That’s because the deeper you go
into the ocean,
the higher the pressure.
And this affects the boiling temperature.
Already at 10 m (32 ft)
below the water’s surface,
the boiling point
becomes closer to 120 °C (248 °F).
So not all the ocean water on Earth
would turn into vapor.
But in the steamy shallow waters,
most living organisms,
plants and animals would likely
spend these five seconds
boiling to death.
Maybe only thermophiles,
microorganisms that thrive
at temperatures up to 108 °C (226 °F),
would survive unscathed.
You wouldn’t enjoy this brief
apocalyptic window of time
very much either.
The steam would scald your skin
and seriously injure your eyes.
Even just taking a breath
during this time
could cause mucous membranes
in your mouth, nose and throat
to suffer severe burns.
If these burns were deep enough
to destroy tissues,
you could end up
developing rhabdomyolysis.
This condition could result in permanent
damage to your heart and kidneys.
Or even death.
But that’s not even the worst.
There’s also a lot of ready-to-boil water
somewhere else.
In your body.
Yeah, you’re about 60% water.
If this water to turn into steam,
you’d know it.
Your body's water would suddenly increase
in volume by 1,600 times.
Well, you and anything else
that has water inside it would
simply explode from the inside out.
But maybe you’d be lucky
and five seconds
wouldn’t be long enough to detonate you.
That wouldn't mean that life
following the worst heat wave imaginable
would go right back to normal.
No, immediately after the five seconds,
the global temperatures
would drastically drop.
And all that water vapor
would transform back into liquid.
You’d better be prepared for some crazy
flash flooding and extreme weather.
And that steam turning back into water
would bump the temperatures
in the surrounding environment.
Things could heat back up enough
that polar ice caps
and glaciers would melt even faster.
When all that ice disappeared,
the sea levels would rise
by about 70 m (230 ft).
Even though Earth would only have boiled
for about the same amount of time
it takes for one big yawn,
it would create circumstances
where major cities around the world
could become flooded and uninhabitable.
Millions of people could die
in the aftermath.
And that’s if they didn’t already
turn into spontaneous steam bombs.
OK, why don’t we cool
things down for five seconds instead?
All the way down to absolute zero.
That’s a story
for another WHAT IF.