Our moon splits roughly in half with both halves remaining in orbit within relatively close proximity to it's current position.

.. How does this effect the Earth and life here?

This post was edited by ClancyBrown on Jan 10 2012 10:18pm

I imagine its gravity would pull itself back together. But I'm no physicist so I don't really know.

er negligible. and yes its gravity could pull it back together...then again its gravity would prevent this entire situation from occurring

The change in effect on the Earth would be minimal, from what I'm understanding is your scenario. The two moon-halves stay next to each other at all times anyway? So basically you still have the same amount of mass the same distance away.

The moon halves would collide with each other and shoot dust out into space, and that dust would ultimately either fall to the Earth and burn up in our atmosphere or fall back onto the Moon as moon dust.

Not really a whole lot else I can think of, though.

it would sure as hell give our space programs a jump start. exploring and documenting the interior of the moon would be awesome.

The further they get apart, the weirder the tides get

but they wouldn't really get further apart

if separated long enough, i'd say the halves will start to crumble into a more spherical shape

that's one, so we could have two moons

Tides would still come in, tides would still go out. And you still wouldn't be able to explain that.

Apparently the moon is hollow