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Q&A

If there was a majority of land on earth (66 percent land), how would it affect the animals and plant?

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If there was a majority of land on earth (66 percent land), how would it affect the animals and plant? Lets say somehow earth has been created with 66 percent land and 34 percent water? Would our planet still have life? How would it affect our ancestors? The would be less sea life creatures I guess.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/6380. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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One effect I could imagine is that life would have entered land earlier in evolution, since there's less space in the upper ocean levels (the ones which are most life-friendly, because below there's no sunlight). Probably also the deep sea would be a bit more populated, but not much because there's still the energy limitation (and the total energy the ocean gets is still proportional to the water surface).

However a lot depends also on how the water is distributed. If the water is mostly near the equator, a lot more water life can be supported than is the water is mostly near the poles.

As Henry Taylor already mentioned, the planet would likely have drier land. Not only because less water surface means less evaporation, but also because more land area means that the evaporated water would be distributed over a larger area, and a lot of the area would be further away from the water. Note, however, that this is an average; certain areas could still be quite wet (especially near the ocean, or at mountains where there's typically wind coming from the ocean). I'd expect there to be large deserts in the middle of the land.

A larger part of the land would have continental climate as opposed to maritime climate (obviously), with the corresponding vegetation.

Less water in the air also means less greenhouse effect, so the climate could on average also be a bit colder.

Of course a lot of this also depends on other factors; I was assuming a mostly earth-like planet, just with less oceans. Another option would be a hotter planet where the oceans are smaller because more of the water is in the air due to the high temperatures. Such a planet would, in opposition of the scenario described above, be very humid; probably most, if not all, of the land mass would be covered by rain forest (or that planet's equivalent).

Another reason for less water could be that the planet is so cold that most of the water exists as ice on the continents (a sort of an extreme ice age). In that case, most of the planet would have conditions like we know from the Arctic/Antarctic. Tropical conditions would be unheard of on that planet. This planet would be very dry because not only the water from the sea, but also from the air would be mostly bound in ice and snow.

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