Is the Earth Gaining Or Losing Mass? 356
Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC recently asked physicist and Cambridge University professor Dave Ansell to draw up a balance sheet of the mass that's coming in to the earth, and the mass going out to find out if the earth is gaining or losing mass. By far the biggest contributor to the world's mass is the 40,000 tonnes of dust that is falling from space to Earth every year. 'The Earth is acting like a giant vacuum cleaner powered by gravity in space, pulling in particles of dust,' says Dr. Chris Smith. Another factor increasing the earth's mass is global warming which adds about 160 tonnes a year because as the temperature of the Earth goes up, energy is added to the system, so the mass must go up. On the minus side, at the very center of the Earth, within the inner core, there exists a sphere of uranium five mile in diameter which acts as a natural nuclear reactor so these nuclear reactions cause a loss of mass of about 16 tonnes per year." (Read more, below.)
Pickens continues: "What about launching rockets and satellites into space, like Phobos-Grunt? Smith discounts this as the mass is negligible and most of it will fall back down to Earth again anyway. But by far the biggest factor in earth's weight loss are the 95,000 tonnes of hydrogen that escape from the atmosphere every year. 'The other very light gas this is happening to is helium and there is much less of that around, so it's about 1,600 tonnes a year of helium that we lose.' Taking all the factors into account, Smith reckons the Earth is getting about 50,000 tonnes lighter a year, which is just less than half the gross weight of the Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise liner that recently ran aground."
I was really hoping for gaining mass (Score:5, Funny)
It would have given me a nice excuse the next time my wife noticed I had gained weight. "It's not the junk food, honey. The earth is gaining mass and causing me to weigh more!!!"
Re:I was really hoping for gaining mass (Score:5, Funny)
Well I got good new for you regardless. Since the earth is losing mass, the gravity will become weaker, resulting in lower numbers on your bathroom scale. :)
(Although it's probably not going to be so noticeable in the shortcut.)
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If only gravity wasn't the weakest of the fundamental interactions. Damn you, physics!
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Look at it the other way: The earth is losing mass, so you're doing it a favor by gaining mass to compensate.
Re:I was really hoping for gaining mass (Score:5, Funny)
Except that the mass gained by him was transferred from the food that he ate, and not created from outer space.
Well, that depends on your diet, now doesn't it?
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It is indeed zero at the center, but at the center, this is the pressure of all the rest of the matter that should worry you instead of the direct gravitational effect
since the rest of the matter wants to join you at the center
And you both seem to have missed... (Score:4, Informative)
The most baseless claim in the summary is that there is a 5 mile wide sphere of Uranium acting as a nuclear reactor at the centre of the Earth.
There is no evidence for this, it's just wild speculation.
Re:I was really hoping for gaining mass (Score:4, Funny)
My take-away is that we're going to have to kick Global Warming into high-gear in order to counteract the much more serious (and embarrassing) Global Shrinkage!
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Kind of like Viagra for the globe.
Re:I was really hoping for gaining mass (Score:5, Funny)
40K Tonnes of dust! (Score:2)
No wonder my TV is always covered. Time for a bubble dome to keep it all out.
The Earth may be losing mass... (Score:5, Funny)
But Americans are attempting to even things out.
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But Americans are attempting to even things out.
I'm certainly doing my part!
Nuclear core - huh (Score:2)
Wait (Score:5, Interesting)
So you count the 16 tonnes a year from a nuclear reaction that may or may not be there, but you ignore the effects of space rockets, some of which have payloads in the hundreds of metric tonnes? (the Saturn V can carry 45 tonnes to a Lunar Injection orbit and over twice that to LEO.) Huh, interesting.
Also, what is this about the weight of the Costa Concordia? I want to know how many Libraries of Congress that is per year, damnit.
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16 tons/yr for m(b)illions of years is in aggregate a lot more than a few hundred tons a year for the last few decades.
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The Library of Congress has " roughly 10 terabytes of uncompressed textual data." Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
12 terabytes is ~5 billion sheets of paper (typewritten), so assuming a linear relation then 10 terabytes = ~4.16 billion sheets. Neatorama [neatorama.com]
So with Wolfram Alpha this is about 20,800 metric tons, so a bit less than a quarter of the Costa Concordia gross weight. Wolfram Alpha [wolframalpha.com]
Oops (Score:2)
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Wha--?! (Score:2)
Wait, what? Isn't the mass already there but is just being distributed differently? What am I missing here?
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What am I missing here?
Mass-energy equivalence. [wikipedia.org]
Geothermal (Score:2)
at the very center of the Earth, within the inner core, there exists a sphere of uranium five mile in diameter which acts as a natural nuclear reactor so these nuclear reactions cause a loss of mass of about 16 tonnes per year.
Sounds like the ultimate source of geothermal energy, so let's start drilling for it. Got to get there before Iran goes and makes a bomb out of it.
A planet which your mom is living on? (Score:2)
It's gaining mass.
End of the World (Score:3)
One thing that most posters overlooked was the statement that the Earth's GeoReactor may be shutting down (in anywhere from 100 years to 1 billion years). The theory states that when this happens the earth will lose its magnetic field and then its atmosphere. Scary!
AGW has debunked nuclear core theory (Score:2)
AGW science uses sophisticated computer modelling to show that the Earth's climate is driven by the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere...the 'forcing function'. The nuclear core theory provides for a nuclear reactor generating 4 terawatts of heat that must be continuously radiated into space. Moreover, the nuclear reactor output varies over time from full production to zero production to full production.
http://www.rense.com/general25/vore.htm [rense.com]
Such variation obviously has never happened
Re:AGW has debunked nuclear core theory (Score:4, Informative)
Huh?
The knowledge and certainty level about nuclear georeactors is quite low (understatement), and it is a minority opinion that it exists. If it does we certainly don't know enough about its prehistory either and what the consequences to climate would have been, so the climatological record isn't remotely conclusive on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget#Incoming_energy [wikipedia.org]
Incoming solar radiation is 173 petawatts, 44 to 47 terawatts from "stored heat and radioactive decay" (probably not from fission), which is 0.025%.
So a variation of 4 terawatts is about 0.002% of solar insolation. Now the climate can be sensitive but I doubt it's that sensitive. It probably wouldn't be possible to pick up a fluctuation in a 4 terawatt core georeactor in climate data.
The core georeactor should be actually reasonably easy to detect if you can analyze neutrino scattering data and get initial angle and energy distribution of the incoming particles. That fact that I haven't heard of such a signal (the neutrino experimentalists would have found an unusual pesky background that they couldn't get rid of when trying to measure solar neutrinos) leads me to believe far more directly and without reference to climate that it's unlikely there's any signifcant core georeactor. Maybe it's possible it was just missed, and was in the data.
Atmospheric physics and dynamics is much, much better understood since we've had experiments and theory for 50 years or so.
There's No Georeactor (Score:5, Informative)
There's no evidence of a georeactor in the Earth's core. We know this by measuring the abundance of geoneutrinos - neutrinos generated by radioactive decay and nuclear fission. The KamLAND, Japan and Borexino, Italy discovered a ~50% deficit in geoneutrinos i.e. 22 of 44 TerraWatts of heat comes from radioactive decay. The rest is primordial, left over from the Earth's cataclysmic formation. If there was a georeactor there would have been an anomalous abundance in geoneutrinos (KamLAND detected fission neutrinos from nearby Japanese nuclear reactors).
The hypothesis of a georeactor, powered by a 16km diameter sphere of Uranium, was put forward by maverick scientist J. Marvin Herndon. He also believes the Earth is expanding and he rejects plate tectonics. Despite that, mainstream science did not ignore him but enthusiastically tested this georeactor theory.
Gando, A. et al., 2011. Partial radiogenic heat model for Earth revealed by geoneutrino measurements. Nature Geoscience 4(9), 647-651.
Re:There's No Georeactor (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the linked article, it all sounds very interesting, and reasonable plausible, and even perhaps worth serious investigation. That is, until you hit first the part that sounds like a crank complaining about being ignored by mainstream science, and then the absurd notion that the fusion reaction in stars can only ignite from a running fission core (where did that fissile material come from then?), or the equally absurd notion that thermonuclear bombs are proof that stars can ignite in that way.
That said, I'm glad that someone took the idea of a sustaining nuclear reactor seriously enough to test it.
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:5, Funny)
IF one assumes AGW the mass of heating the crust and atmosphere of the earth a tiny fraction of a degree per year isn't going to give tons either. Math people, try it sometime. It works a lot better than your hokey religion.
And neither match a good blaster by your side.
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Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, I got his blaster comment. Best laugh I've had all day!
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So what is the mass equivalent of 222,504,000 TeraWatthours if one gram of matter is equivalent to 10E+13 J of energy?
8912 metric tonnes [wolframalpha.com].
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:4, Informative)
This estimate would be vaguely correct if you used the Earth's surface area. However, the Earth's cross-sectional area is area of the 2D disc that is formed by a meridian. The area of solar radiation it absorbs is exactly its cross-sectional area. (What part of the surface that happens to be changes as time passes and a unit of sunlight is spread over a larger surface around the edges, but the total area is constant and is simply the cross-sectional area.)
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:5, Funny)
Math people, try it sometime. It works a lot better than your hokey religion.
Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerous ways, Lord jmorris42. Your sad devotion to that ancient math has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you enough clairvoyance to find the rebels' hidden fortress...
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So now burning (hint, just a chemical action) some dead dinosaur is releasing the energy equivilent of 160 TONNES?
I'm pretty sure he means that if the surface temperature increases by 1 degree C, then that corresponds to a higher amount of energy in the planet. it has nothing to do with burning fuel or anything else.
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:5, Informative)
It takes over 4 Joules of energy to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Your 22,964.4 Joule figure would be sufficient raise the temperature of 5.5 liters of water by 1 degree C.
The earth's mass is slightly larger than 5.5 liters of water and thus requires slightly more energy to raise its temperature by one degree.
Try again [wikipedia.org]
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So how does that translate to 160 tonnes a year? The total mass of earth is estimated as 5.9721986×10^24 kg [wolframalpha.com] or 5.9721986×10^21 tonnes. To raise that mass by 1 C requires 22,964.44 J of energy.
Ahem... 22,964.44 Joules of energy will not heat very much stuff up by 1 degree Celsius. That's less than the metabolic energy of 1 gram of fat. You missed something pretty important in your numbers.
Regardless, this was not talking about raising the average temperature of the entire mass of the Earth, but an increat in the "surface temperature" of the earth. There's a pretty big difference. However....
And it takes about 100 years to raise the temperature of earth by 1 C. So I'd say their math is way off.
I imagine it would take a pretty long time to raise the temperature of the entire mass of the earth by 1 de
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To raise that mass by 1 C requires 22,964.44 J of energy.
Even assuming you meant ~23,000 kilojoules (as your energy figure suggests), this is still off by many orders of magnitude. One kilogram of water takes 4.184 kJ, so ~23 MJ will raise ~5500 liters of water by 1 C. Per Wikipedia, the ocean is estimated at 1.3 * 10^21 liters. Raising that by 1 C takes 5.44 * 10^24 joules, which is equivalent to ~60,500 metric tons. Based on your assumption of 1 C per 100 years, that's 60.5 tons per year for the ocean alo
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, your math is WAY off. How'd you go from mass to required energy without determining the specific heat of the earth?
Here, let me calculate the energy required to heat just the iron content of the earth (34.6% by mass) by 1 C: 9.278* 10^26 J [wolframalpha.com], which is equivalent to 1.037 & 10^7 metric tonnes [wolframalpha.com].
You are off by a LOT of decimal places. A mere 23kJ should have immediately tipped you off as not passing the smell test. That's less than 1/1000th [wikipedia.org] of the energy released by burning 1 liter of gasoline!
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[...] 23kJ[...] That's less than 1/1000th [wikipedia.org] of the energy released by burning 1 liter of gasoline!
And that's why cars are causing global warming! duh.
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah it sucks how the earth warms 1000 degrees every time I drive to work. Sorry for cooking everyone! :)
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-- I am a crackpot
So you are, so you are.
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What about insolation [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, so the earth isn't retaining an increasing amount of heat? What evidence do you base this assertion on?
Spread throughout the whole of the Earth, combined with how much we're incapable of utilizing, that totally doesn't surprise me. Consider how much energy from the Sun hits the Earth every year that all just goes to waste, let alone what is reflected or shines off in other directions.
I think only a reactionary, kneejerk idiot would make this kind of ridiculously wrong statement.
It'd help your argument if you had something more than a tenuous grasp on thermodynamics and the processes involved with the retention of heat. Also, do consider that when working with the masses of planets and the energy output of stars, 160 tons is so easy to come across that, yes, it is highly like that this is in fact the case. Funny, though, how you get so violently worked up over it.
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Honestly, though, the state that global warming is adding 160 tons of mass to Earth is just BS. You could say that if we were talking about geological time periods, but global warming (if it exists) definitely doesn't exist for geological time periods. Ice ages last long enough to get noticed by the planet's interior, warming periods do not.
It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet. And even the worst case runa
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It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet.
So what? If the entire damn planet, core and everything, heated up by 1 degree the result would be a damn lot more than 160 tons of extra mass-energy!
The calculation is based simply on the estimated amount of excess solar energy retained. It has nothing to do with whether or not the energy spreads through the earth. The energy is already here, increasing the earth's mass.
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Do the calculation yourself (or just read below) - it is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude!
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Hey look another idiot like the OP who thinks "Do the math!" means use vague qualitative statements!
Guess what, "ginormous" and "miniscule" have different meanings when talking about the scale of the earth, and the energy received by the sun. The sun dumps thousands of metric tonnes worth of energy on the earth every year. The earth masses at around 10^24 kg. 160 tonnes is in fact minuscule. It can't realistically be accounted for just by atmospheric heating, but that's not the same thing as saying it's
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Without working it out, how do you know?
It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet.
Who said this had to be the case? Can you get 160 tons (in energy) of heat by heating only the atmosphere? Atmosphere plus surface water and land? What does it take?
Without data, you're just making shit up based on a guess.
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The calculations are below in the thread. It is off by 3 orders of magnitude if you look at only atmospheric heating.
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Even without reading the article, I think it is safe to say the 160 ton per year figure is derived from the heating of the E
It's cold out there... (Score:2)
how much energy from the Sun hits the Earth every year that all just goes to waste
Try living for a couple of weeks facing nothing but deep space (e.g., south pole in June), then you'll learn what that energy is wasted for...
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Remember, we're not talking total energy; just the delta in a year. If that is 0.1 degrees per year, that's what would need to fed into the energy/mass equation. Other comments in this thread show how the entire input of the sun on the earth in a year come out to 80 tons. I doubt the increase in heat year over year even makes one ton.
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Nobody is claiming that burning fossil fuels is causing an issue from heat released from the chemical reaction. Sort of like how if you detonate an atomic bomb, the fallout kills far more than the initial bomb blast.
Are you suggesting that mass is converted into energy in a chemical reaction?
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:5, Informative)
So now burning (hint, just a chemical action) some dead dinosaur is releasing the energy equivilent of 160 TONNES? Eh?
No. Burning is mass-neutral. Not only is it chemical, as you point out, but the energy released during burning is still in Earth, so by mass-energy-conservation, the total mass of the Earth is unchanged.
It's the increasing average temperature of the Earth that causes the increase in mass. That temperature increase is not energy released from burning fuel, but rather additional energy captured from solar radiation (as a result of increased atmospheric CO2). So ultimately all the additional mass is coming from solar radiation.
160 tons of mass ~= 10^22 J
Solar irradiance over the surface of the Earth ~= 10^17 W ~= 10^24 J/yr
Math people, try it sometime.
I see that you didn't take your own advice. I see no math in your post whatsoever, despite the fact that 1 kg of mass in energy is easy to compute and the total energy used by civilization has been estimated before.
IF one assumes AGW the mass of heating the crust and atmosphere of the earth a tiny fraction of a degree per year isn't going to give tons either.
See, here math would have been useful.
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To add more math:
You'd have to heat 10^19 kg of air (air only) by 1 K to increase its mass by 160 ton. [ (160 ton * c^2) / (N_A * k_B * 1 K) * (29 g/mol) = 4.6 * 10^19 kg ] The mass of Earth's atmosphere is 10^18 kg (5 * 10^18 kg). So it's well within the realm of "you'd need to analyze this more carefully".
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Wait - the expected global warming is on the order of 1 degree per century, not per year - so they are really off by 3 orders of magnitude. They aren't talking about warming the atmosphere. They are calculating the warming of the entire planet, including the core. Very silly - way before a 1 degree change has propagated even a tenth of the way in we will be back in the more usual ice age climate.
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They are calculating the warming of the entire planet, including the core.
Where's it say that?
Also, I gave figures for warming the air only, no water or land. It's a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if you're within a few orders of magnitude. If you're within 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, you need to work out whether your estimate is accurate enough, and mine isn't, by a long shot.
The better way to approach this is probably to look at the difference between solar insolation and thermal radiative losses to space, since those are easier to measure than what mass of the Earth i
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Thanks, I was going to go through those same calculations, because I couldn't believe the numbers. In fact, I double checked your numbers (because I still had trouble believing) and came up with the same thing.
It's shocking to me that the energy accumulated by Earth from solar radiation is measurable in tonnes! Remember that the devastation from a nuke comes from a fraction of 1% of the mass of a relatively tiny piece of uranium.
To add a little more math, the atmosphere weighs roughly 5*10^21 grams. The
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. Simply raising the the temperature of an object does not raise the mass. What are you guys smoking?
We're smoking Einstein's old pajama pants. Also, we're correct and you aren't. Higher temperature means more energy in a system. More energy means more mass. Yeah, it's a little weird. It's also an inevitable consequence of the constant speed of light, and the conservation of momentum and energy. Starting with those three assumptions you can prove that E=mc^2.
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Well, a kilogram of mass directly into energy is easy to calculate. E=MC^2, so 1 kg of mass is equal to 1 kg* (300,000,000 m/s)^2 which is 90,000,000,000,000,000 (kg*m*m)/s*s or 90 petajoules. That's 25 billion kilowatt-hours. Average monthly household electric usage is 920 kilowatt-hours, so that's 27,173,913 households for a month, or 2,264,492 households for a year. So, assuming 100% conversion to electrical power and no transmission loss (in the real world, less than 25% of that original power would pro
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Also, as long as we're talking religion, AFAIK, nobody's ever drilled down to the Earth's Core. What makes them think it's made of Uranium?
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Solar energy, however, does increase Earth's mass via energy, and a byproduct of that energy is global warming
That's what man-made global warming is. (The term "anthropogenic" is better here to imply that it's man-caused and not man-made.) We do things that increase the fraction of the heat from solar radiation that remains on Earth*. The Sun then causes Earth's temperature to increase.
* Specifically, since Earth is more or less in a vacuum, its entire thermodynamic exchange consists of radiation: (a) the Sun irradiating the Earth, adding energy and (b) Earth radiating out into space. Factor (a) is basically a cons
Re:One kilogram of mass = 40 minutes (Score:4, Funny)
One kilogram of mass converted directly to energy would last about 40 minutes.
(Picks up a bag of sugar, eyes it thoughtfully)
40 minutes, eh? That's still pretty cool...
Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me. (Score:4, Funny)
Congratulations! You've just posted the most idiotic slashdot comment of 2012.
We've still got a little less than 11 months to go, don't be giving that award out just yet.
Re:energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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energy is added to the system
i thought energy can not be created or detroyed
Moved, not created or destroyed.
Come out of your mom's basement, look up at that bright yellow object in the sky.
If there is any global warming, that's where its coming from.
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The big yellow one is the sun!
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Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
-- M.C. Hawking, "Entropy"
Re:What sphere of Uranium? (Score:5, Informative)
Some models do have some kind of nuclear-reactor thing going on at the very center, but it's indeed not right to present it as some kind of fact, when it's greatly disputed what might be there (and our evidence is very circumstantial). As far as I can trace it, the proposal for a "nuclear georeactor" in a sub-core of the inner core is due to J.M. Herndon, who proposed it in 1996 [pnas.org], and has since developed the idea in various other papers. I don't think it's anywhere near consensus, though.
fringe theory, not mainstream (Score:5, Informative)
the mainstream view is that the iron-nickel core of the earth is of the same source and composition of iron-nickel asteroids, which have little or no uranium.
Re:What sphere of Uranium? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Enough for Eternity (Score:5, Funny)
And here some people are worried about running out of uranium.
We'll never use up a 5-mile diameter sphere of uranium!
The problem is getting to it.
I mean if you believe "science" then it's surrounded by molten rock.
And if you believe the book journey to the center of the earth, then its surrounded by dinosaurs.
Both I understand are fatal to humans.
in situ utilization -- the greenest way to go (Score:4, Insightful)
Also has the beneficial side-effect of (allegedly) creating earthquakes, how cool is that?
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Care to clarify? Or are you just threadshitting?
Re:Tards (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so you're threadshitting via ignorance. Good job.
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I guess he wanted to add mass to the thread.
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Re:Tards (Score:4, Interesting)
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you? Please try, if you can, to explain what was wrong with the statement.
To quote a later AC post that seems to also be from you: "You can't create mass, it's a basic concept in science."
Believe it or not, there's more to science than what you learned in grade school. If the composition of the Earth's atmosphere changes in such a way that it traps more energy from the sun, that will cause an increase in mass.
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The gravitational mass would go up. Energy produces gravitation as well.
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Re:What Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends which globe you are talking about. If you're not talking about Earth- you're off topic.
If you're talking about Earth and look at overall trend analysis graphs covering the last 100 years- the last 15 years fit in the scale correctly. Also 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred during the past 15 years.
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Including the warmest year on record, which happened exactly 15 years ago. This is an excellent example of the denialists manipulating statistics to their own ends.
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Average temperature anomaly for the past 15 years: 0.5 C
The 15 years before that: 0.2 C
The 15 years before that: 0.04 C
You were saying?
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I'm not entirely sure if you're being serious or not.
Nonetheless, assuming you are, your sense of up/down is actually derived from gravity, and not merely spatial positioning. Since gravity is always pulling you towards the center of the earth, you cannot perceive any difference in your orientation with regards to what direction is up.
However, if you use a specific star as a reference point, and look at how high in the sky it is at a certain time of night at on a particular day of the year at each loc
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Those mottled white splotches on the windshield and hood are not dust, mate.
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The energy is stored in the state of the matter, not in its mass.
So, nature is more complex than we credit it for and, as a result of that, we should dumb down our understanding of modern physics to ignore mass-energy equivalence and binding force. Got it.
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Re: as the temperature of the Earth goes up...!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding energy increases mass, you normally dont notice it because c^2 is pretty big.
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Ever look at the periodic table of elements in detail? Notice how hydrogen is not exactly one, helium is not exactly 4, nitrogen is not exactly 12, etc.? Well partly that's because of different isotopes (carbon 12, carbon 13, carbon 14, etc), but even if you had a pure isotope, it wouldn't come out exactly. That's because part of the mass of an atom is tied up in the binding energy in the nucleus, and the binding energy between the electrons and the nucleus.
If you take hydrogen and oxygen and react them