Why yes, I did just watch a Nicholas Cage movie. I looked through the search engine and I didn’t see anything like this question from the 4 or 6 search results. I didn’t think anything too bad would happen, certainly not a fiery inferno engulfing the Earth. But, certainly, something bad would happen. I remember something from one of my science classes (geology?) stating that life on Earth is dependent on the ozone layer. But, doesn’t the ozone layer mainly keep out UV radiation? Is there other radiation (cosmic or otherwise) to be concerned about (assuming no helpful mutation :))? Couldn’t we all survive underground somehow?
I take the word “suddenly” to me at the snap of the fingers. If so, society is unprepared for such suddenness. More importantly, so is the rest of the planet. Think food supplies. Think weather.
Think worldwide death on the order of weeks to months.
Not sure exactly, but something that would instantly remove our ozone would probably also wipe our our entire atmosphere. I hear a sufficiently large asteroid passing sufficiently close at a sufficient speed would accomplish that. In that case, I don’t know what would kill us first, suffocation, cataclysmic impacts from the space debris that peppers every non-atmospheric planet, or if we could hold out long enough to have all life die off because the solar and cosmic radiation destroying our DNA.
Or is it out magnetic field that prevents the cosmic radiation overload? Maybe it’s both.
Life on earth is dependent on many, many things. We are a product of a delicate stasis of everything remaining the same. If Jupiter went away, for instance, we’d probably be destroyed pretty quick.
What I’d like to know is if we really need the moon. I think its two biggest effects on earth are reflecting light during night time, and tides. I think we could get by with significantly darker nights, but I’m not sure about the tidal effects. Is anything significantly dependent on tides? Perhaps if tides stopped, one area might experience some flooding.
Without the tide, evil villains’ plans of burying heroes up to their necks in sand on the beach and waiting for the tide to come in and drown them would all be foiled.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but in the movie, it wasn’t that the ozone layer disappeared.
The Earth was hit by a super solar flare. Which was cool disaster porn, in my eyes. But then angels showed up and saved two kids and put them right next to the Tree of Knowledge, which I didn’t think was quite so nifty.
We would find out what it feels like for a piece of meat to be microwaved, or something close-ish
In The Bad Astronomer’s recent book “Death from the Sky”, he discusses this. Plankton and such, at the bottom of the food chain would be killed by the unfiltered UV radiation. Once they were gone, the die off would move up the food chain.
Um, I’m pretty sure we would be killed by the unfiltered UV radiation too.
No; we have UV resistant skin, clothing and sunglasses/shelter. It wouldn’t be good to us but we could survive. Day living animals and especially plants would be in serious trouble.
Nothing to add, but that I’m reading that book at the moment, and I’d highly recommend it to the OP if (s)he’s got any more space-related doomsday questions 
Seriously, it’s a cool book.
Ozone is NOT a naturally stable substance. Keep some around and it goes back to O2 or reacts with other stuff pretty quickly
Ozone is CREATED by UV radiation in the upper atmosphere. And destroyed by other processes.
So, the current ozone layer is a dynamic balance of those processes. You suddenly magically remove whats there, its going to quickly build back up.
Whether that build up is quick enough to avoid disaster is the question. My WAG is anything short of longggg term lack of ozone aint going to be that big a deal.
Remember, normal stuff like our atmosphere and water do a decent job of blocking UV. Ozone is just much more efficient at it.
My understanding is that the worry is that animals and unprotected people will develop cataracts; that cancer will be much more likely in exposed skin; and a lot of plants will sicken or die. Assuming that the ozone layer does build back up ( one of the worst aspects of CFCs is that being persistent they keep damaging it over time, which doesn’t let the layer build back ) the effects of a short term vanishing would remain with us.
While what you described was true, what they actually said was going to happen in the movie (and presumably did happen) was what I asked in the OP. So, not knowing what losing the ozone instantly looks like, I assumed that’s what it was. All this confusion could have been avoided if they just stuck to one cataclysm. Oh, and I agree with your take on what happened.
Cage said that the Earth was going to be hit by a super solar flare. The result of the flare was going to knock out the ozone layer and the lack of ozone layer was going to cause cataclysm. At first, I was like, ok, time to go underground. Then, they showed the inferno. I didn’t think anything was going to be alive after that.
The protagonist also claimed that the resulting radiation would penetrate a mile or so into the Earth. :dubious:
Muons created by cosmic rays in the atmosphere can indeed penetrate the earth for a mile or so. I’m not sure how/if that applies to your scenario, though.
“What happens if the Earth suddenly lost its ozone layer?”
According to Steve Martin, all of our farts would fall back to earth.
(and not on their original owners!)
Thanks for pointing that out. It saved me the bother.
I’m not an expert, but I’d expect it would build back up quite quickly. On the order of minutes to a few hours. That is, on the sunward side of the planet. Anywhere in the dark will have to wait until the sun rises, of course.
It seems to me that if ozone built up that fast then CFCs wouldn’t be able to do so much damage. I think we’d be looking at years or decades to get back to the present level. Especially if the CFCs are still there ( and some are still being produced ).
It depends on how quickly ozone is created and destroyed.
Whats you need to know is what the aggregate half life, so to speak, is of the ozone creation and destruction process is.
Thinking about it last night, I remembered the infamous Antartic ozone hole. The level really drops in winter due to 3 major things. The upper atmosphere there is sorta self contained. New ozone cant get in from elsewhere (as well as the CFCs are trapped/stay there doing their evil). Finally, it gets dark for months on end, so no ozone is created that whole time.
Once the sun comes back in spring, the hole makes a sigificant (nearly full? full?) recovery.
So, that seems to indicate to me that if you magically made all the ozone dissappear, it would build back up to helpful levels fairly quickly, even in the presence of CFCs and other man made nasty ozone eaters (that I think are actually dropping these days).
I am not convinced that even permanent loss of the ozone would destroy the world, but thats just my semi literate science WAG.
I am significantly more sure that a few months of low ozone levels would most likely result in just observable and measurable things happening…but no world wide ecological/paradigm shift.
If a REAL ozone/UV/biologist expert drops in, I’d be interested to hear their take on this.
I think the real problem is that any mechanism that wipes out the ozone, even just once, would have other effects WAY worse than that little problem, barring a magical removal.
Kinda like worrying about how the noise from a nuclear weapon is disturbing the animal life.
Or you have something like King Jong Ill usings all his deodorant cans at once and the ozone is gone and stays gone for decades, in which case, at least some somewhat bad things happen IMO.
Yeah, but is it deadly? Doesn’t the magnetic field put a damper on it?
In the movie, it was a solar flare coming too close to earth causing its destruction. Kinda like having a blow torch aimed at a marshmallow.
As for “what if the ozone poofed?” question. UV-b radiation would immediately start destroying any DNA in cells of exposed creatures, causing cancer for one thing. Maybe not immediately but it would end in death for many.
At the same time, the ecosystem would be ripped apart because the smallest creatures would immediately die and the larger creatures that eat them would soon follow. in the sea, plankton would die and krill would follow cause they eat plankton. Anything eating krill would die soon after, if they lived long enough and didn’t get cancer…meaning fish and other water creatures. So much for that food supply…
On land, plants that were not UV resistant would die, destroying any plant eating animals cause they would starve. And anything that ate those plant eating animals would be next, if they lived past the cancer. death of grass = death of cows = death of many humans. So much for that food supply…
And this is just a simple part of the balance of the world we live in, there is much more that would happen if we lost the ozone.
Something would survive tho, I can’t say what would and would not but it wouldn’t be a world I would want to live in but the instinct to live is too strong for everything to die and I would try to be among the few that would try.
Ozone would eventually build back up but it would be a slow process. Too slow for it to help a few generations tho. UV radiation actually makes Ozone but only if there is oxygen to make it and if the ozone poofed…the oxygen would have to come from somewhere and that somewhere would be closer to earth. It takes too long for it to rise back up where we need it…that is why it would be too slow. If the oxygen was just converted from ozone (o3) to a single oxygen(o1) molecule or to a double molecule (o2), it would speed things up but from my guess, you meant all the oxygen (in the form of ozone) would disappear.
Yes we could live underground and create a place to live but it would only be a small portion of the humans and they would have to live their for a while with a whole eco system in place, already prepared for such a disaster.
CFCS destroy ozone and take about 20-100 years to degrade before they stop damaging the ozone layer so…thats going to happen for a long time.
I wouldn’t worry too much about dying if the ozone poofed tho…the human overpopulation is much more of a problem at the moment. At the rate we are reproducing, there isn’t going to be enough food to go around.
No, the moon does also a very good job at catching asteroids close to earth, and stabilizing Earth’s orbit - so much that scientists often call it a double planet.