Why One Side of Earth Is Rapidly Getting Colder Than the Other
The research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, uses computer models of the last 400 million years to calculate how “insulated” each hemisphere was by continental mass, which is a key quality that holds heat inside instead of releasing it. The pattern goes all the way back to Pangaea.
Earth has a red hot liquid interior that warms the entire planet from inside. It spins, too, generating both gravity and Earth’s magnetic field. This holds our protective atmosphere close to Earth’s surface.
Over the extremely long term, this interior will continue to cool until Earth is more like Mars. The surprise in the new study is how unevenly the heat is dissipating, but the reason makes intuitive sense: Parts of Earth have been insulated by more landmass, creating something of a Thermos layer that traps heat.
This contrasts with how Earth loses most of its heat: “Earth’s thermal evolution is largely controlled by the rate of heat loss through the oceanic lithosphere,” the study authors write. Why is this the site of the greatest loss? For that, we need a quick-and-dirty run-through of continental drift.
Earth’s mantle is like a convection oven that powers a treadmill. Every day, seafloor surface moves a tiny bit; new seafloor is born from the magma that erupts at the continental divide, while old seafloor is smashed and melted beneath existing continental landmass.
To study how Earth’s interior heat behaves, the scientists built a model that divides Earth into African and Pacific hemispheres, then divides Earth’s entire surface into a grid by half degrees latitude and longitude.
The scientists combined several previous models for things like seafloor age and continental positions during the last 400 million years. Then, the team crunched the numbers for how much heat each grid cell contains over its long life. This paved the way to calculate the rate of cooling overall, where the researchers found the Pacific side has cooled much faster.
Previous research on this seafloor effect only went back 230 million years, meaning the new model, which goes back 400 million years, almost doubles the timeframe being studied.
There’s a surprising contradiction in the findings. The Pacific hemisphere has cooled about 50 Kelvin more than the African hemisphere, but the “consistently higher plate velocities of the Pacific hemisphere during the past 400 [million years]” suggest the Pacific was much hotter at a certain moment in time.
Was it covered by landmass at some point in the far distant past, keeping more heat inside? There are other possible explanations, but either way, the Pacific’s high tectonic activity today points to a heat disparity. The meltier the mantle, the more the plates can slide and slam together.
See more here: popularmechanics.com
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very old white guy
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I agree that the earth will someday be a cold dead dry rock and I said so decades ago, but hey, computer models, this why we have whu who flu panic around the world.
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JaKo
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Well,
It has been some time since I read an article from “popularmechanics.com”
But this: “It spins, too, generating both gravity and Earth’s magnetic field. This holds our protective atmosphere close to Earth’s surface.” goes beyond what I could ever imagine. I guess they were very “Woke” hiring their “diverse writers” — I wish them good fortune with this kind of approach.
Sorry, JaKo.
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tom0mason
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Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the authors of the new study explain how they used models of tectonic plate cycles in order to demonstrate variations in heat loss across the planet over the past 400 million years. …
See https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020GL092119
So you get some data to verify your supposition and you find that it doesn’t quite. Well then, your supposition could well be wrong. Go away, think and measure more then come back with better.
Not for modern science though, no lets just jig around with computer models, torturing the data, and make more assumptions …
From the link
By way of explanation, they propose that much of the Pacific mantle was once insulated by a long-lived supercontinent called Rondinia, which trapped a great deal of heat before it broke up around a billion years ago.
It’s therefore possible that the heat trapped by this ancient insulating layer has not yet fully dissipated, and continues to affect the internal temperature of the Pacific hemisphere.
I wonder how well that (Krister S. Karlsen, Clinton P. Conrad, Mathew Domeier, Reidar G. Trønnes ideas and assumptions) fits with the theory here —
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825204001011
or here https://www.academia.edu/9320028/Late_Proterozoic_plate_tectonics_and_paleogeography_A_tale_of_two_supercontinents_Rodinia_and_Pannotia
where the researchers had the honesty to outline their assumptions and methodology in fine detail.
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MattH
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“Torturing the data” Priceless!.
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Artelia
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A lot of us thought it was geo-engineering
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