What If Water Got So Thick You Could Walk on the Sea?

Something goes wrong and all the water on Earth starts getting thicker, and it doesn't stop. In your kitchen the stream from the tap turns smooth as glass, the bubbles in the glass barely rise, and the water falls in a rope that coils on itself like honey. Outside, the rain falls just as fast as before but nothing splashes; drops sit on your sleeve like glass beads, the puddles creep down the lane and the river slows to a crawl. A duck waddles across it. The weir's waterfall sags into a glassy curtain and the tide stops. In the harbour the storm swell slows and stops mid-wave, a gull lands and stands on the sea, and you climb down the ladder and walk out across it. Then your view rises over the stopped bay, the stuck ferry and the wilting fields, up into space, where every ocean on Earth shines like a mirror. The readout in the corner is how many times thicker (more viscous) the water is than normal; the second one is how long it would take to pour a glass. The numbers are real. Water at room temperature has a viscosity of about one millipascal-second. Milk is a few times thicker, olive oil about 84 times, honey up to about 10,000 times. Raindrops keep falling at the same speed however thick they get, because the air sets how fast a raindrop falls, not the water inside it. Runny lava, about 380 pascal-seconds, was measured in a flow on Kīlauea in 2016, and glassblowers shape molten glass at about a million times the viscosity of water. In 1927 the physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland in Brisbane poured hot pitch into a funnel; since the stem was cut in 1930 only nine drops have fallen, and the pitch is about 230 billion times thicker than water. Hit it with a hammer and it shatters. Glacier ice flows at roughly ten quadrillion times the viscosity of water, and Earth's mantle, the hot rock that carries the continents a few centimetres a year, about a septillion times. Some of it is not real, or not known. Nothing can make water thicker like this. When the raindrops stop splashing, how much of the swell stays frozen, how slowly you sink and how long a glass takes to pour are our own estimates from simple formulas, right only to within a factor of ten or so. Glacier ice has no single viscosity; it depends on the stress and the temperature. We assumed the water inside living things, and ice, stay the same, and that very thick water shatters under a hammer like pitch. The gold holograms are pictures of the idea, not measurements. And the very last thing that happens is made up. It all took under seven minutes. By the end, one glass of water would take more than 20,000 times the age of the universe to pour. 0:00 Water won't stop getting thicker 0:06 The kitchen tap 1:10 The rain 2:04 The river 3:04 The harbour 3:57 Walking on water 4:58 The whole bay 5:54 The whole Earth 6:53 Wait #whatif #science #water #physics #ocean