Natural geothermal heat under Antarctic ice: 'Surprisingly high' Geothermal heating from within the Earth's core – as opposed to the possibly warming air or sea – has been measured beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet for the first time ever. And, we are told, it is "surprisingly high." The West Antarctic sheet is the part of the Antarctic ice cap thought to be easiest to melt. Worries …
I've always been puzzled that little debate seems to include the "hot interior" when discussing climate change. Heat loss presumably drives things like tectonic activity (convective plumes?) and the geological record suggests that the planet has gone through phases of intense volcanic activity followed by quiescent times.
Heated outside by the sun and inside by something else (radioactive material??) - what's the heat balance look like?
"I've always been puzzled"
There's been no debate because many feel that *any* debate as to the extent of overall warming from various sources will inevitably allow 'deniers' like me to pop up and argue that, although CO2 is a problem, it's a problem that we have time to deal with.
Of course there's some truth in that argument. Also, the fact that politicians won't do anything unless their feet are held to the fire doesn't exactly help matters when it comes to fair and balanced debate.
If there's a continued recovery in north pole ice over the next few years it's going to be an interesting time for nu-statistics.
Also, the fact that politicians won't do anything unless their feet are held to the fire doesn't exactly help matters
...and said fire must produce a fair amount of CO2, thus linking politicians directly to CO2-based-climate-change. So the solution is presumably to get rid of the politicians - or at least the ones that pursue inactivity as an art form.
No No No. Only Carbon Dioxide has any effect on the Earth's climate; this fact was discovered by Al Gore who deservedly, therefore, became very rich; his hypothesis has been now been verified by one the World's greatest Physicists, Paul Nurse, who is too busy to comment as he is fully engaged, burning the Royal Society portraits of dead white males who discovered stuff, in order to be replaced by those of women who didn't, including some who nevertheless produce highly literate articles which never need sub-editing for the Guardian and whose CVs demonstrates an enormous natural talent for creative writing.
Wikipedia sub-title sums it up: "Earth's internal heat and other small effects"
173,000 Tw from Sun onto Earth
47 Tw emitted from Earth's core
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth.27s_internal_heat_and_other_small_effects
Those not trusting Wikipedia can perhaps follow the references to other more-credible sources. or even conduct their own analysis.
Wikipedia sub-title sums it up: "Earth's internal heat and other small effects"
The figures don't really matter - this situation can be reasoned about without even needing any quantifiable data. The long term trend has to be either to a dynamic equilibrium or for net ice build up. We know this by the simple fact that the ice sheets are there and haven't already melted away and indeed have built up over time - they weren't always there after all. Therefore natural ice loss must on average be at least matched by new ice formation.
However we can see a long term trend to less ice so something has changed. The amount of geothermal heating certainly does but that is a slow steady decline, not an increase.
Radioactive material?
Really? You do realize that the core of this planet is molten rock and iron, right?
Riddle me this... what is meant by the earth's magnetic poles are shifting?
Now what could cause that?
When the so called 'boffins' start to put two and two together, they'd understand that while global warming is occurring, its not man made.
Don't get me wrong, I'm against pollution and want a cleaner environment. I just don't like the fact that people are willing to fudge on data and lie about it so that people take the change necessary seriously.
Man made pollution will kill us, yet Mother earth will rebound.
It is believed by many that radioactive decay of potassium, uranium and thorium isotopes may be a major reason the Earth's core is as hot as it is. We don't know for sure what is down there, but the simplistic models that show the core as a ball of solid iron surrounded by liquid iron are obviously not telling the whole story as it should have lost much more heat since the Earth was formed since tidal stresses from the Sun and Moon don't nearly account for it.
"Motive Force for All Climate Change" was posted at ClimateRealists.com on May 14, 2009 and explained the variable solar/cosmic particle bombardments, and variable magnetosphere protection as the cause for our variable internal Earth fission, resulting in our variable climate. This has been followed by a dozen articles, with major web posts and archived at FauxScienceSlayer.com under the Geo-thermal tab. In addition to climate change, this variable fission force is also the source for Abiogenic Petroleum production. There is NO Carbon climate forcing, NO 'sustainable' energy and NO 'peak' oil.
We have been systematically LIED to by the elitist controlled parrot press and political puppet show. It is time for Crimes Against Humanity trials and executions. End feudalism.
@ Faux Science Slayer:
My freakin' gawd, sir, but your unsupported blatherings are hilariously risible.
But ... Well ... Ooops... Oh... Sorry... Perhaps I'm simply missing your sly humor, as you craftily slather such memes as "this variable fission force" and "Abiogenic Petroleum production" and "elitist controlled parrot press".
My bad. My mistake. I didn't realize that you're simply an absurdist humorist, and not a serious commenter.
Never mind.
"Lead author Andrew Fisher, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, emphasized that the geothermal heating reported in this study does not explain the alarming loss of ice from West Antarctica that has been documented by other researchers. The ice sheet developed and evolved with the geothermal heat flux coming up from below--it's part of the system. But this could help explain why the ice sheet is so unstable. When you add the effects of global warming, things can start to change quickly," he said."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150710160922.htm
How come that part never got mentioned?
That we live on top of a burning molten mass and have another one above us, yet we are still so focused on man made global warming. Because even considering these things, the temperature has gone up faster than expected, with the cause looking likely to be increased levels of CO2 for which we appear to be responsible for. In this case it's the first time this geothermal heat has been measured, so we don't have any history to spot any trends. It's all interesting, but associating it with climate change doesn't really help.
> That we live on top of a burning molten mass and have another one above us, yet we are still so focused on man made global warming.
The source of the warming is still very much in the hands of the sun. The "man made" bit is simply that we are very good at chucking stuff up in the air which acts as a small multiplier on the 173,000 TW that the sun spits out, either allowing more energy through in the first place (CFCs) or stopping it radiating back off into space (CO2).
I'd also note that there are other bad things about lots of CO2, such as acidification of oceans destroying coral reefs, not just the warming debate ^H religion.
Something that's always bothered me about this in the US. Yellowstone, potentially the largest volcano on Earth with FSM knows how many TJ of heat energy lying in wait and absolutely, as far as I can see, no attempt to harness even a small amount of this. The objections I've seen to this are to do with geysers stopping and the survival of some of the exotic extremophiles, I'm pretty sure it could be at least trialled without affecting these in any way. Maybe we just need to be in a more energy deficient environment before this becomes important, well it's only a matter of time I suppose.
Actually Efros is onto something even though he doesn't acknowledge having a solid handle on it. Yellowstone was one of the first parts of the US to be designated a federal nature preserve. As such, the government position on any sort of exploitation of resources in the area gets an even more jaundiced view than the econazis in these part give a Lewis Page article. It's getting to the point where they don't even want tourists in the park even though that's specifically part of its mission.
Theoretically there is plenty of geothermal power available, as usual it's all about the economics. You need to drill deep (expensively), temperatures are low by the standard of a commercial steam turbine (more expense) and the water's highly corrosive (expensive). And often geothermal power isn't where people are living (expensive) .
As long as cheap coal and hydrocarbons are the benchmark for pricing energy, and allowed to ignore the majority of their environmental costs, it is hard for any renewable to compete - hence the complexity and politics of subsidy.
Yellowstone is a national park, beloved by many, and there would be a tremendous amount of resistance to building all the infrastructure that would be required there to support this. Not to mention all the worry warts who would be concerned that tapping the heat would cause Old Faithful to stop erupting, or worry that drilling is going to cause the supervolcano to blow.
"as far as I can see, no attempt to harness even a small amount of this"
Attempts have been made. The problem is that rock is a piss-poor conductor of heat, so once you start extracting energy that's percolated up from the magma chamber you're limited in what you can take by the influx from surrounding rock or the temperature declines and thermal efficiency of your turbines drops. Many geothermal projects have discovered this the hard way.
Pumping water in just makes it cool faster.
The icelandic geothermal plant is slightly different because magma is very close to the surface and being fairly constantly topped up. There aren't many places like it.
But it is! Fracking is so insidious that the terrible effects travel backwards in time like an ecological Terminator to cause environmental disaster before any fracking took place! Sumatran earthquake in 2004? All because some fucker decided to frack for shale gas in Yorkshire in 2016.
Mark my words, it'll all be true!
Combination of the two. The problem is that the WAIS has become the southern hemisphere poster child for the effects of climate change. To hear that the melting may not (in total or in part) be due to the climate change upsets the purists as it's not 'on message'. An inconvenient truth one might say.
The melting has been going on for a long long time. The problem is that we only started looking in the last, what, 50 years? So is it normal, cyclical or a real problem? Dunno.
It could be that the combination of warming from climate change *and* geothermal is enough to cause a problem. But we're some way from being able to determine if that's the case. Big IMO.
This geothermal melting has been going on as long as man has been measuring temperatures in Antarctica and possibly long before that. We are not going to all the ice melt down there because the is a thermal balance - as the ice melts in one place it freezes in another. In fact there is more sea ice round Antarctica now than there has been since the 70s.
It is only in the last 40 odd years that green ecofrekes have been looking for government money to fund their religion and latched on to the idea that it wasn't the sun or the internal heat of the earth or the fact that we are recovering from a little ice age causing the slight warming but it had to be mankind producing a rather beneficial plant food that was the cause of said warming. They then took that as the end result and wrote computer models that would give that result and then declared it had to be so because the models said it was so. Since none of the models have been validated there isn't much to worry about. Also water vapour is much more of a greenhouse gas than CO2 will ever be but you can't scare the population with clouds.
"In fact there is more sea ice round Antarctica now than there has been since the 70s."
There's so much fresh water coming off the continent at the moment that it's affecting salinity levels and in the heaviest flow areas there's a layer of freshwater a few metres thick overlaying the salt stuff - something that used to only be seen in New Zealand's Fiords.
Bear in mind that seawater freezes at -15 to -17C and fresh at 0C.
Bear in mind also that this is WINTER sea ice. It disappears very quickly once it gets the sun on it and summer ice extent is so far much the same as it was.
In any case, ice sitting on water doesn't change sea level. The worries are about land-based ice above sea level and that's currently sliding into the ocean at a rate of more than 150km^3 per year. (roughly 4700 tons per second. That's a lot of olympic swimming pools)
Clouds are not water vapour they are liquid water droplets or ice crystals. The antarctic sea ice almost all goes in Summer, and theres your worry, the ice is no longer in equilibrium, it is reducing, steadily, year on year. And as legions of scientists, not ecofreaks whatever they are, learn more about the interesting processes that influence our climate it becomes more certain that the relentless biassing of the carbon cycle through increased transfer of carbon from geological stores to the atmospheric and oceanic stores is stressing those climate systems. Civilisation arose in a narrow climate window of opportunity, should we close that window, it is not certain that civilisation will continue.
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