What would happen if you took evaporation out of the water cycle? If evaporation suddenly stopped, what would happen?
by 
Lewis Aleigh
ANSWERS: 5
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This sounds like a high school homework assignment. No evaporation of water means clouds would disapear. We'd have to get used to rainless sunny days. Yes, it would get warmer too. The evaporation process consumes energy and this energy now would take the form of heat. Next consider all the secondary effects this rise in temperature would have on the Earth's ice caps and sea level. Eventually all the rivers and streams would stop flowing. It would make the Earth a hot, dry, windy desert. I wouldn't want to be around. Oh, cabana boy!
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Tom Diller's answer is good for the most part, but I question one aspect of it. He says that without evaporation Earth would get warmer because that process would not absorb heat. That may be so, but there is another aspect of this that would cause cooling. Water vapor is, by far, the most important of the greenhouse gasses. Without evaporation, the atmosphere would dry out. (It probably would not dry out completely, but it would become much dryer.) This loss of water vapor from the atmosphere would mean that less heat would be held in by the atmosphere (especially at night) and this could result in a general cooling of Earth. I don't know the numbers involved here. So, I can't say how much this would offset Tom's warming, but it is a facter to consider.
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The question states evaporation stops. This means energy or heat is not consumed in this process. So, this additonal energy or heat will build up. I didn't see any comment in the question about condensation. If evaporation stops there will be an additonal amount of energy in the form of heat. This will be like the Earth having a heat stroke.
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As I'm sure you all know, evaporation is caused by particles absorbing heat energy and moving faster and further. If particles were unable to absorb this energy, and use it to move around, then the earth heating and cooling would not be an issue, because it wouldn't exist. In fact the universe would not exist. In the early stages of the universe, about a second after the big bang, the universe was extremely hot. Early particles and anti particles needed this energy to escape the initial gravitational energy (which was due to the majority of matter in the universe being in a very small space in the first few seconds of the big bang). The extreme heat gave enough energy to the particles, so that there positive and negative energy was greater then the gravitational energy, allowing them to escape and expand outward. If the particles were unable to use this heat energy, then the universe would have only lasted a few seconds, because the gravitational energy would have exceded the energy of the particles, and contracted back in on its self very quickly. The universes life span would just be a quick flash.
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we would stop chatting on answerbag. i'll have to go and dig for water!
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