Next Great Player

My family recently witnessed the lunar eclipse and my children asked me about the moon. I told them that without it, we would all die and the Earth would be devastated. Someone once told me that it affected the water somehow.

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If we didn’t have a Moon, the global altitude of the ocean would have been different. If you take away the moon, suddenly a lot of water would be redistributed toward the polar regions.

Earth would spin much faster without its orbiting moon. That’s because the moon’s gravity pulls on Earth’s oceans. The moon is largely responsible for the tides. The pull of the moon, and ebb and flow of the tides, puts the brakes on Earth’s daily rotation.

The Moon has been a stabilizing factor for the axis of rotation of the Earth. For this reason, we had much less climatic change than if the Earth had been alone.