What If the Moon Disappeared for a Year?

You look up at the exact spot where the Moon should be, and it is empty. No explosion, no debris, no warning. For one full year it does not come back. Most people would guess that nothing much happens. It is only a light in the sky, after all. But the Moon moves more water every day than every river on Earth combined, and it sets the clock for animals from coral to lions. We follow the year month by month: the first truly dark night, the tides that shrink to a third, the shorelines and the animals that lose their timing, the one night a whole reef has to act as one, and the hidden job the Moon does that no human life is long enough to notice. Then we look at why this experiment is already, very slowly, coming true. When was the last time you really looked at the Moon? Go and find it tonight, then tell us in the comments what phase it was in. Next on Hour Zero: What if no baby was ever born again? 0:00 The empty spot in the sky 1:11 Night 1: the dark 2:54 Week 1: the tide 5:20 Month 1: the shore 7:12 Month 3: the animals 9:19 Month 6: the clock 11:41 Month 12: the return 12:52 What if it never came back? 14:59 How we got it 16:32 The real lesson Sources: NOAA, Tides and Water Levels; NASA Moon Fact Sheet and Lunar Laser Ranging; Laskar, Joutel and Robutel 1993 (Nature) on the Moon and Earth's tilt; Casiraghi et al. 2021 (Science Advances) on sleep and the lunar cycle; Dacke et al. 2003 (Nature) on dung beetles and moonlight; Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority on coral spawning; Natural History Museum, London; Packer et al. 2011; Last et al. 2016; Levy et al. 2007; Munk and Wunsch 1998; Lissauer et al. 2012. The scenario itself is a thought experiment. Footage and photos: Wikimedia Commons, public domain and CC0 only (NASA, NOAA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and other U.S. government sources; Unsplash contributors under CC0). AI disclosure: the narration is AI-assisted.