- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: an REG Omega
Not sure which forum this fits in, but here goes...
According to the books, when a planet is glassed, the oceans are hit as well and boil away. The planet's surface is bombarded with plasma until there is absolutely nothing left. After a few days, the atmosphere boils away and leaves the planet truly barren. This is scientifically impossible.
If such a thing were to happen and the oceans were to boil away, we can assume that plasma was hot enough to crack a lot of that water into its component atoms, hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would be light enough to escape the planet's gravitational pull. The oxygen would not. The atmosphere wouldn't boil away. It would actually be many times denser.
Basically, the conditions on the surface of a glassed planet would be like the surface of Venus on a bad day. The ground temperature would be several hundred degrees celsius, with the crust partially molten. The atmosphere would be a greenhouse oven, meaning it would stay that way indefinitely. Finally, there would be increased seismic and volcanic activity, and the atmosphere would be mainly composed of a very flammable, very toxic, and very corrosive gas: oxygen.
Just a thought.
You missed one thing. The ozone & the earth magnetic field is what keeps the atmosphere. The magnetic field would be greatly disruped by extremely high yeild plasma, having it's own magnetic hodgepodge, and a magnetic casing strong enuff to contain it. Once our ozone is gone... nothing will live, and the atmosphere is reduced to almost nothing.
[Edited on 6/27/2006]