what if #566
Description
What if a giant circular portal opened at the deepest point on Earth — the Challenger Deep — and started draining the ocean straight onto Mars?
You might expect chaos, massive whirlpools, or global floods… but almost nothing would happen. Even with a 20-meter-wide opening, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to drain the oceans. They’re simply too big. The sea level would drop by less than one centimeter per day, and from the surface, you wouldn’t see anything at all. But let’s break reality and add more drains. At fifty meters of sea level drop, continents reconnect and coastlines completely change. At one hundred meters, entire seas get cut off forever. At five hundred meters, land bridges form between countries that were once oceans apart. Eventually, the oceans split into isolated basins, the draining stops — and Earth is left dry, unstable, and barely recognizable. Life collapses. Humanity might survive… but the world we knew is gone.