What Happens If There's No Wind On Earth? | Unveiled

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What Would Happen If There Was No Wind on Earth?</h4>

In everyday life, we perhaps spend more time feeling frustrated by the wind for how it affects us than we do appreciating how important it is. Really, the wind is immensely powerful, integral to human life and culture, and a phenomenon that likely exists on every planet with an atmosphere. But what would life be like without this immutable force of nature?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what would happen if there was no wind on Earth?

The wind is a little strange when you sit back and think about it. It’s completely invisible but can be extremely strong, a major cause of fatalities in natural disasters. And it’s created by simple mechanisms in the atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere is heated unevenly because of how it tilts on its own axis, with one hemisphere always leaning nearer to the sun. This heating creates air pressure differences, with different air pressures leading to very different weather effects; hurricanes, for instance, are caused by low air pressure, while high-pressure weather systems are usually cloudless and comfortable. Cloudless conditions bring cold weather in winter and hot weather in summer.

Wind is so powerful that it’s often a major part of myths, legends, and fables. In Greek mythology, Zeus, the god of the sky and thunder, is also the king of the Olympians, a testament to the raw power of storms and cyclones. Maybe Zeus would never have existed, or some other god would be the leader of the Greek pantheon otherwise; Poseidon, maybe, since earthquakes and tidal waves would still happen without the wind. Nevertheless, while the wind can bring life and death, we really do need it to survive.

That said, one benefit of a windless alternate world would be a stop to severe storms. There wouldn’t be any hurricanes anymore without winds, and if you live in an area prone to tropical cyclones, the thought of never having to deal with another one (and the tragedies they bring) might make the loss of wind seem worthwhile. No wind would also have an impact on wildfires. Fires would still happen, but less frequently, because without strong gusts, we wouldn’t have thunderstorms; and the main natural cause of wildfires, lightning strikes, wouldn’t occur. Even if a fire did break out, without strong winds to spread and make that fire worse, it would be much easier to contain and put out. The Santa Ana winds, for instance, in California, are today a major contributor to California’s notorious, annual wildfires; without them, the fires wouldn’t be so severe. On a slightly less life-threatening note, without wind you’d also never need to contend with the daily dangers and irritations they can bring. For example, a wind-free existence could make living with certain allergies, like hay fever, far easier, because the wind wouldn’t be blowing all of the pollen around.

With all of that in mind, however, the flipside is far, far worse. The consequences for wind ceasing to exist – or never having existed in the first place – are apocalyptic, to say the least. Tropical storms and wildfires are bad, certainly, but they’re also vital parts of the ecosystem that occur naturally. And it’s not just massive, life-threatening storms that we wouldn’t have without the wind; it’s pretty much any storms at all. Without wind to circulate evaporated water, the water cycle itself would be interrupted, perhaps terminally. When water evaporates, it rises, condenses into clouds, and then falls back to Earth as rain. Though there are other mechanisms that move clouds through the sky, our winds are a major part of it. Without them, water would still evaporate, but only to fall back down as rain in exactly the same location, rather than spreading around the globe. This is then very bad news for anybody who doesn’t live immediately next to a large body of water, and it might be disruptive enough that rivers and streams – unless they’re particularly large – would dry up completely. 

Everything inland would end up barren, with crops failing and human and animal populations forced to move to the coast, or to around large lakes. Admittedly, human civilization is already built around bodies of water - thanks to trade routes and plain common sense - but with modern technology, some cities are still built great distances away from the sea. Without the wind to guide the water cycle, though, our water supply could be interrupted, which would have immediate and deadly consequences. Inland cities would certainly fail. Meanwhile, if you DO live near a major lake or ocean, then you’re actually going to get more rain than usual, since the clouds above are never going to be blown anywhere else. Living in a constantly wet and humid environment is far better than suffering because of a lack of water, but still not ideal. In general, then, without wind, Earth would be transformed into a world of stark contrasts; wetlands and deserts, with little in between.

A lack of wind would affect the temperature, too. Wind is caused by temperature differences in Earth’s atmosphere, yes, but it also carries those temperatures around. That’s why cold snaps can be caused by cold air blowing in from somewhere else. Temperatures would stagnate very quickly in this windless time, meaning that only the rotation of Earth and the sun would affect our temperature. We would then have much less varied weather. And without the movement of air, parts of Earth would get permanently more extreme. The poles would freeze over completely, losing more liquid water for us, although potentially averting further climate change, as well. Then again, down at the equator, temperatures would become so high without the winds to limit them, that it would be practically impossible to live there. People would flock to those milder areas of the northern and southern hemispheres to survive - although with the sudden lack of reliable food and water sources, due to the lack of wind, survival would be far from guaranteed.

This peculiar scenario would also mean that everything in the world that’s powered by wind would stop working. Currently, about 6% of global electricity comes from the wind – though some countries rely on it more than others. The exceptionally windy United Kingdom, for example, produces nearly a quarter of all its energy in this way. So, this lack of power is sure to make an impact worldwide. There would be blackouts and electricity shortages, with no way to easily make up the difference. We’d still have solar power, at least. But hydroelectric power sources could suffer, too, as water from rivers dries up and the dams quickly empty. Short of world-changing levels of investment in solar, we’d have to resort to nuclear energy and back to fossil fuels; the short and long-term effects could be catastrophic.

But just how likely is something like this to actually happen? Thankfully, it’s just about impossible. If you’re living on a planet or a celestial body with any kind of gaseous atmosphere at all, you’re going to have wind. This means that for Earth to suddenly NOT have wind, or even to never have had wind at all, it would also need to have NO atmosphere whatsoever. And, suffice it to say, if Earth didn’t have an atmosphere, then the lack of wind would be the last thing we’d need to worry about… because we’d have no air to breathe and nothing to protect us from the full heat of the sun.

Ultimately, this is a situation that can be taken even further still. Because another thing that fuels the atmosphere and the movement of the wind, in general, is the rotation of the planet itself. So, would a truly wind-free Earth also be an entirely still world, suspended in space? If so, then we might also imagine that while not rotating around its own axis, Earth might also not continue traveling around the sun. If it somehow just stayed put, this would mean one side of it would be immensely hot while the other is unfathomably cold. But it wouldn’t just stay put. Instead, without rotation, it would more simply just fall into the sun at the center of the solar system. Again, this would be something else far more worrisome than the initial fact that we’d also have stopped having wind. 

The good news is, then, that there’s not really any mechanism by which something like this is possible. Absolutely everything in outer space is moving all the time, and if Earth stopped doing that, then it will have defied the laws of physics. If Earth didn’t have wind but did still have an atmosphere, then there’s really no scientific process that could allow for that.

So, what do you think? Would you rather take the few pros of not having any wind over the massive downsides? Could you imagine life without wind, really? Let us know in the comments.

For now, and actually forever, while it can be inconvenient and even highly dangerous at times, it is an integral part of what makes this place a habitable planet, capable of supporting so much diverse life. But that’s what WOULD happen if there was no wind on Earth.