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Extinction Questions: Global Flood; DL;DR: de-orbiting comet floods the earth, how fucked are ocean ecosystems?
Topic Started: Aug 17 2017, 12:39 AM (283 Views)
Noah's Raven
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This may be a stupid/weird question and better suited for the "Questions that don't deserve a thread" thread, but bear with me, this is research for a potential spec project once I build up the confidence:

Let's say a comet comes just close enough to Earth to get captured by Earth's gravity, only to gradually break up and have small chunks de-orbit over centuries/millennia, adding its water to the oceans and flooding the land. By the time this giant deluge is over, the only vestiges of the continents left above water are the tops of the highest mountains--anything below 22,598 feet (6,888 meters) is underwater. The Himalaya/Hindu Kush/Karakoram mountain ranges form an island chain, and Aconcagua and Ojos del Salado are two very lonely islands where the Andes used to be, but that's it.

I understand that land biota are UTTERLY ROYALLY FUCKED by this mass extinction, but what would happen to sea biota and the overall global climate? I imagine they wouldn't be doing so hot either, but I really don't know enough about climatology or oceanography to say why or how. What kind of salinity does cometary ice have, anyway?

Thank you in advance.
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Dragonthunders
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Just to mention a fact, I remember that there was the same scenario to this one in the mini series of "Evacuate Earth", which showed the earth being flooded entirely, but instead of a single comet, this event is caused by the a wandering icy dwarf planet which collided with the moon and its remains gradually fall in the earth, reason why would say that you require more matter than could have a comet to be able to flood a planet.

Forgetting that and concentrating more on the "what if" scenario, I would see this as an event of mass extinction the sea as well by the sudden loss of shallow water, coral reefs, among other coastal and surface environments, it could be that the open sea doesn't have many effects, although with the eventual rise of the sea and probably a potential climatic change caused by the new geography of the planet, there could be a collapse of the marine food chain too and the eventual loss of most of the open sea fauna too.
I would imagine that with the creation of many more abyssal areas one could see an eventual diversification or colonization of the deep fauna, although I am not sure of the effects in the present abyssal zones in this flooded Earth if they now support another 6 km of water.
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Noah's Raven
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Thanks for responding in so much depth! Your DeviantArt account was a big inspiration of mine when I was starting out doing spec scenarios.

That "Flooded Earth" episode's actually where I got the idea, but I forgot what the series was called. Could have sworn it was a comet on the show, though. Ah well.

I didn't think of this until you mentioned it, but an extra 6km of water on top of the current abyssal habitats might literally squeeze the life out of them. How much pressure can abyssal fish even handle? They might be forced to migrate out of the old abyssal areas to colonize the old continental shields, now under a comfortable amount of water.

You also mentioned the changes of such a massive sea level rise would have on the global climate. I know that when Stephen Baxter did something similar in his Flood/Ark duology, he implied that the lack of land would mean that tropical storms would never hit anything strong enough to sap their energy, eventually leading the earth to develop a system of storm belts full of near-permanent hurricanes, like a gas giant. That's an interesting idea, but I'm not too sure about its plausibility.

EDIT: I tracked down the actual episode, if anyone's interested.
Edited by Noah's Raven, Aug 17 2017, 09:41 PM.
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