Have you ever imagined what would Earth be like if we had another moon in our night sky? If not then lets imagine that the Moon's identical twin comes hurtling towards us and got trapped by our planet's gravity. Now the Earth has two moons. Would it change any thing? How would it impact the life on Earth? How would it change the ocean tides? Would it impact the length of month? What if these two moons collide? We have a lot of question. So, lets find out the answer by digging deep into this topic.
When the second moon would come hurtling towards Earth, the very first thing that we would notice that the night sky will be much brighter, and it would be a spectacular view every day of the month. But our understanding of month itself would not be the same. The addition of a new moon would force us to come up with another way to measure a month because then we would have two moons with their own separate phases and as our old calendar are based on one moon phases, they would not be relevant anymore.
Then very soon, the nightmares would start, and our focus will shift towards our survival because of the reasons listed below:
The Moon and Earth are in gravitational tug-of-war and this helps Earth in generating tides in oceans. And if there would be two moons in the sky, this effect would get amplified resulting in tides 6 to 8 times higher than the current tides. The difference between low and high tides would average around 300 meters or 1,000 feet. This would erode coastal areas and flood most of the famous coastal cities including New York, Singapore, Mumbai and London. Constant tidal flooding would shrink the overall habitable area on Earth.
Click here to find out the impact of flooded coastal cities in detail.
If you think that we would be back to normal and enjoy the spectacular night view as soon as we relocate the people from coastal cities, you are taking this event very lightly. The arrival of second moon would wreak havoc on Earth. Its gravity coupled with original moon's gravity would cause massive tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic activities. Then the ash and chemicals would cover the sky and fall down with rain. This would cause extinction level events on Earth.
Once all of this is over and somehow we survived, the next phase would start. The combined light from both the moons would make for much brighter nights and we would have fewer or no fully dark nights due to different orbital periods of both the moons. But that's not the end. While all of this would be happening, the moons would keep spiraling away from Earth and their combined gravitational pull would keep slowing down the Earth's rotation at much faster rate. This would increase the length of days much faster than the current rate of 1 second every 40,000 years.
Within a few million years, one day would be longer than 30 hours but here's the problem: while the two moons would be slowly moving away from Earth, they would be moving towards each other and eventually the two moons would collide. This massive collision would rip the two moons apart and send their debris back towards the Earth. It would be a meteor shower of epic proportion and another extinction level event for all life on Earth.
But the debris that didn’t fall on Earth would get trapped in Earth's gravity forming a ring of debris around the Earth. Now the Earth will have ring similar to that of Saturn. Eventually, the ring would dissapear because those chunks of rocks would collide to each other forming a single moon-like satelite.
So the earth would be back to where it started, a planet full of potential for new life forms with single moon orbiting around it.
So, this is what that would happen if our planet had two moons. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in comment section.
Click here to find out What would Our Earth be like without any Moon.
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