What If All The Oceans Were Having Liquid Mercury?

 Have you ever went to a beach and had a look on those beautiful waves approaching towards you?

Those would surely be eye soothing on a Sunday after a long week, But What would happen if those oceans would be having liquid mercury instead of our familiar water?

What's shiny, liquid, conducts electricity, and also has a planet named after? You probably guessed it right, it's Mercury. This naturally occurring metal has quite a lot of uses, but simultaneously it is very toxic, even tiny amount like few milligrams could potentially be life threatening. 

Could earth actually hold this much amount of mercury? would we be able to survive? how could this actually affect our environment?

Before you built a image of ocean filled up with mercury, let's learn about some of it properties, Mercury is the only metal which exists into liquid state at room temperature. Mercury doesn't actually break down as basic element and turn into gaseous state as we witness water to show this property. It merely changes it's state.This makes it even more toxic and can get easily built up in soils and ultimately into environment.

Already there's a lot of accumulation of this into our environment due to human activities like gold mining or mineral extraction of ores like Cinnabar(HgS). It has many uses in making of amalgam, making it useful for extraction of metals like gold, or extending battery life by bonding with zinc. It also happens to be temperature sensitive, it expands as temperature rises and contracts as temperature is lowered down, owing to this property it is also used in thermometers. 

So if we ponder upon this hypothetical situation of oceans filled up with mercury, the most immediate change we would see is objects buried in ocean would come on the surface of ocean and float like a balloon. Everything which is dumped in the ocean would simply pop up on the surface, making oceans look like a huge floating dumping place. This is because mercury is nearly 13.5 times heavier then water, making it incredibly buoyant then water. Most surprising fact is that, replacing water by mercury, the mass of earth would increase by just 0.62%, this would not create much drastic effect on gravity. But this could create much larger pressure on tectonic plates which would in turn lead to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions at much larger scale. Even if we managed to survive those natural disasters, atmosphere having clouds of mercury, Air surrounding us would be contaminated with mercury causing life threatening problems like cancer.

But the best thing is, this hypothetical situation can only be there in your bad dreams, in this real world it is not possible to have oceans of mercury. 

So don't go and propose your crush, thinking that world is near end😄. That's not gonna happen any day soon. 

Till then, Stay curious😉!

-Devashish-