The Sunken City In 'Waterworld' [spoilers for 20-year-old movie]

Well, there was the bit where she was just in her, well, skin.

And at the time, such tight skin it was.

Rain stars when water condenses on dust or other small particles. Without any land to add particulates to the air, perhaps there never will be rain. With the entire earth nothing but water, there probably won’t be any temperatures differences for water vapor to rise. Perhaps after a time, the atmosphere will stabilize into something like 99% humidity, with some constant temperature over the entire surface, both night and day.

Without temperature differences, there probably won’t be much wind after a while, except for effects caused by the rotation of the earth.

That’s what I think. I don’t know if I’m correct… :slight_smile:

Ocean spray-derived salt particulates and sulphate aerosols derived from planktonic dimethyl sulphide via gas-to-particle conversion are big sources of cloud condensation nuclei.

Are you under the impression that the middle of the oceans has no wind? There’s always temperature differences - not least because of variant insolation. This leads to large-scale circulation.

Of course I think the oceans have wind! I’ve heard of sailboats, you know.

I’m just speculating - with 100% water coverage, and no polar ice caps, the temperatures might stabilize, and the planet might end up like Venus with 100% cloud cover. The circulating currents would move water vapor around but they might not make rain. There’d probably be dew in the morning, but it would form on the ocean surface. You might get this static situation where the atmosphere becomes saturated and stop.

Tides, at least, would be simple. Even if you did have some way of measuring them, they’d be very, very small. They’re only large enough to notice because of sloshing up against landmasses.

Global weather patterns, I have no clue.

Based on what I know of meteorology, I wouldn’t expect any of these effects to occur. The basic Hadley cell circulation would still occur in the absence of land. There is no reason to think that rain would cease.

Could you explain the mechanism by which you think dew would be able to condense on the surface of water?

The basic idea (flood covering the earth) was explored in sightly more detail with Stephen Baxter’s books Flood and Ark, where water trapped in the mantle started spewing out from the mid-Atlantic Ridge and, over the next 100 years or so, all land on earth was overtaken by the rising seas. I found it quite disturbing. But even MORE disturbing was the fact that he didn’t include world maps for each part (Flood was divided into parts where he gave the time period, i.e. 2040-2050, and the sea level rise, i.e. “500 meters above present sea level”.) I had to write a Java application to do that myself.