What would happen if the moon disappeared?
We would be in very serious trouble. Apart from missing something beautiful, we would have seriously reduced tides, by almost two-thirds. The tide cycles are important for the sustaining of various kinds of life along earth’s shores, and tides create important currents that help sustain much of the sea life we have living today. Even worse, the moon has helped to regulate and stabilize earth’s rotation on its axis. In the long term, earth’s tilt would go haywire, due to tugs and pulls by the sun and the other planets. The seasons as we know them would shift and change with disastrous results. At some point, earth’s axis may even become close to coplanar with the ecliptic– the poles would point directly toward the sun a couple of times per year. If the moon disappeared, there’s no doubt that the consequences would be dire.
