Martian Fluvial Flows, Placid and Catastrophic

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Despite the fact that, apart localized dust surfaces in summer, the surface of Mars has had average temperatures that never exceeded about minus 50 degrees C over its lifetime, it also has had some quite unexpected fluid systems. One of the longest river systems starts in several places at approximately 60 degrees south in the highlands, nominally one of the coldest spots on Mars, and drains into Argyre, thence to the Holden and Ladon Valles, then stops and apparently dropped massive amounts of ice in the Margaritifer Valles, which are at considerably lower altitude and just north of the equator. Why does a river start at one of the coldest places on Mars, and freeze out at one of the warmest? There is evidence of ice having been in the fluid, which means the fluid must have been water. (Water is extremely unusual in that the solid, ice, floats in the liquid.) These fluid systems flowed, although not necessarily continuously, for a period of about 300 million years, then stopped entirely, although there are other regions where fluid flows probably occurred later. To the northeast of Hellas (the deepest impact crater on Mars) the Dao and Harmakhis Valles change from prominent and sharp channels to diminished and muted flows at –5.8 k altitude that resemble terrestrial marine channels beyond river mouths.

So, how did the water melt? For the Dao and Harmakhis, the Hadriaca Patera (volcano) was active at the time, so some volcanic heat was probably available, but that would not apply to the systems starting in the southern highlands.

After a prolonged period in which nothing much happened, there were catastrophic flows that continued for up to 2000 km forming channels up to 200 km wide, which would require flows of approximately 100,000,000 cubic meters/sec. For most of those flows, there is no obvious source of heat. Only ice could provide the volume, but how could so much ice melt with no significant heat source, be held without re-freezing, then be released suddenly and explosively? There is no sign of significant volcanic activity, although minor activity would not be seen. Where would the water come from? Many of the catastrophic flows start from the Margaritifer Chaos, so the source of the water could reasonably be the earlier river flows.

There was plenty of volcanic activity about four billion years ago. Water and gases would be thrown into the atmosphere, and the water would ice/snow out predominantly in the coldest regions. That gets water to the southern highlands, and to the highlands east of Hellas. There may also be geologic deposits of water. The key now is the atmosphere. What was it? Most people say it was carbon dioxide and water, because that is what modern volcanoes on Earth give off, but the mechanism I suggested in my “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis” was the gases originally would be reduced, that is mainly methane and ammonia. The methane would provide some sort of greenhouse effect, but ammonia on contact with ice at minus 80 degrees C or above, dissolves in the ice and makes an ammonia/water solution. This, I propose, was the fluid. As the fluid goes north, winds and warmer temperatures would drive off some of the ammonia so oddly enough, as the fluid gets warmer, ice starts to freeze. Ammonia in the air will go and melt more snow. (This is not all that happens, but it should happen.)  Eventually, the ammonia has gone, and the water sinks into the ground where it freezes out into a massive buried ice sheet.

If so, we can now see where the catastrophic flows come from. We have the ice deposits where required. We now require at least fumaroles to be generated underneath the ice. The Margaritifer Chaos is within plausible distance of major volcanism, and of tectonic activity (near the mouth of the Valles Marineris system). Now, let us suppose the gases emerge. Methane immediately forms clathrates with the ice (enters the ice structure and sits there), because of the pressure. The ammonia dissolves ice and forms a small puddle below. This keeps going over time, but as it does, the amount of water increases and the amount of ice decreases. Eventually, there comes a point where there is insufficient ice to hold the methane, and pressure builds up until the whole system ruptures and the mass of fluid pours out. With the pressure gone, the remaining ice clathrates start breaking up explosively. Erosion is caused not only by the fluid, but by exploding ice.

The point then is, is there any evidence for this? The answer is, so far, no. However, if this mechanism is correct, there is more to the story. The methane will be oxidised in the atmosphere to carbon dioxide by solar radiation and water. Ammonia and carbon dioxide will combine and form ammonium carbonate, then urea. So if this is true, we expect to find buried where there had been water, deposits of urea, or whatever it converted to over three billion years. (Very slow chemical reactions are essentially unknown – chemists do not have the patience to do experiments over millions of years, let alone billions!) There is one further possibility. Certain metal ions complex with ammonia to form ammines, which dissolve in water or ammonia fluid. These would sink underground, and if the metal ions were there, so might be the remains of the ammines now. So we have to go to Mars and dig.

 

 

 

 

 

Belated Success?

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When I started my investigation into the mechanism of planetary formation, everybody believed that Mars started out with an oxidized atmosphere, that is the volcanoes that emitted the atmosphere emitted carbon dioxide, as most Earth volcanoes do today. I disagreed, for two main reasons. The first was it was difficult to see how carbon dioxide could be accreted underground, and the second was it was difficult to see how the early Martian rivers flowed. The usual answer was there was a massive greenhouse effect from 10 bars of CO2, but the remains of this steadfastly refused to be found. Had there been, there should be massive lime deposits on Mars, and while such lime does occur, it is only in relatively trivial amounts. A second reason was such an atmosphere should have so much pressure it would rain out in the Martian winter.

I proposed that the early atmosphere of Mars was reducing, which meant that carbon was represented by methane, and nitrogen by ammonia. The ammonia would permit water flow because it dissolves in ice and flows down to minus 80 degrees C Further evidence from inclusions in ancient rocks was that the ancient atmosphere of Earth was rich in methane and the seawater in ammonia. These were important because as the methane became oxidised by reaction with water and UV light, we started to form the molecules so important for the generation of life. Thus methane can be first oxidised to formaldehyde, which can then condense to form carbohydrates.

Anyway, it now appears that my picture is starting to get acknowledged, even if I am not. In a recent Nature communications (2024, 15: 5648) we read “early Mars was characterized by icy highlands, episodic warmth and reducing atmosphere.”

So what did they find? They looked at the distribution of the low surface iron abundance in the ancient terrains and showed that iron abundance decreases with elevation in the older Noachian terrains and with latitude in the younger ones. The Noachian period on Mars was about 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago. The authors suggest the low temperatures contributed here, probably due to freeze thaw cycles breaking up rocks, then they suggest that the distribution mode switched from elevation dependent to latitude dependent. Why that would happen is fairly simple. The initial atmosphere would be highly reducing but oxidation due to solar energy would gradually reduce the greenhouse effect and the concentration of leaching chemicals, and the effect would become more pronounced where it was warmer. The authors conclude that such gradual oxidation gradually cooled Mars and led it to where it is today.

One interesting point is that rovers have found significant levels of sulphate, so could sulphuric acid have been responsible for this iron leaching? They produce a map of Mars that highlights the places where weathering occurred, where sulphates occurred and where the iron depletion occurred. A casual glance shows the sulphates could not have been responsible as they are not in the right places.

However, I disagree with the authors on one point. They argue that the leaching was due to water becoming acidic when at low temperatures. Sorry, no, because the only way you get liquid at those temperatures is from the presence of ammonia, and that is basic. Ammonia by itself will not attack iron oxides, but it should have other chemical species with it. More work is required to understand exactly what went on there.

This will be my last post this year, so may I wish you all a merry Christmas. It is also possible it will be my last post. Chemotherapy has brewed up aggressive chemo-resistant tumours, and I may be too weak, or not here, next year to write. We shall see.

Why Did Tiny Dinosaurs Evolve to Predominate?

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Anyone ever puzzled as to why the dinosaurs became prominent? And how could we work it out? The answer published recently in Nature (doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03889-y) is that scientists have studied what they ate, by looking at fossilized poo and fossilized vomit, the fossils being called bromlites. Apparently there are hundreds of potential samples that have been collected. What the study showed was the rise of the dinosaurs was largely caused by climate change over millions of years in the Triassic period. So over 500 bromolites were cut open and examined.

These were examined with a variety of microscopes, synchrotron microtomography, which uses a particle accelerator to better see inside fossils, and chemical solutions to inspect the exact contents of the remains, which included fish, plants and insects. Despite the age of the fossils, the insects that were eaten were well-preserved, in many cases in three dimensions with all antennae and legs. The analysis allowed the researchers to work out what was eating what, and to see trends over a long period of time.

The team found that the number and variety of the contents of the fossils increased over time, which suggested that the larger dinosaurs with more diverse feeding habits began to gain prominence in the late Triassic period, between 237 and 200 million years ago. By comparing this data with known plant data from the period, the researchers concluded that the rise of the dinosaurs was shaped by chance and adaptation. Thus climate change led to increased humidity, which changed the nature of the available vegetation. The dinosaurs were better able to adapt than were the other land animals. The rise of the dinosaurs took quite a long time, and it was a complex sequence of events. Also, it appears that dinosaurs first evolved in the Southern hemisphere, although caution is needed here because this may depend on the availability of fossils.

The earliest dinosaurs were relatively small bipedal animals, distinguished from their closest ancestors by subtle hip variation, but while they evolved and developed in the above period, they did not rise to prominence until the Jurassic period. At the same time they belonged to a broad group of other creatures called archosaurs, including large herbivores called aetosaurs, large carnivorous creatures called rauisuchids, and crocodile-like phytosaurs. There were prominent non-archosaur reptiles, including large herbivores called dicynodonts. During the first thirty million years of the Jurassic, the dinosaurs increased their dominance, and most of these other large reptiles and large amphibians disappeared.

There have been various theories as to why. One is that the hip structure made the dinosaurs more agile. There were also proposals for st3roid collisions, etc. However, from the vomit study, it turned out that the  time-dependent food web showed the earliest dinosaurs were small omnivores. This would help them evolve because as the climate and food changed, they were better able to adapt to the new food sources, and being small they did not need as much. It was only when the climate stabilized in the Jurassic that the dinosaurs evolved into larger herbivores and carnivorous dinosaurs.

Guidance Waves

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And now for something different from usual: theoretical physics. If that turns you off, so be it, but the reason I am excited is I have now published my ebook “Guidance Waves 2nd Edition”, which I claim is an alternative theory for quantum mechanics. Which raises the question, what does it need to do to be an alternative theory? First, before everyone turns off completely, the main equation is the Schrödinger equation, which is generally considered a foundation of quantum mechanics. So where is the alternative?

First, let me go back a bit. There are two even earlier equations. In the first, Einstein proposed that the photoelectric effect could only be explained if the waves of light contained a particle: the photon. Then, sometime later, a French PhD student, Louis de Broglie, came up with the proposition that all quantum particles in motion have wave characteristics, and he related them through the equation momentum times wavelength equals the quantum of action (Planck’s constant). There have been many experiments that confirm this wave particle duality. Schrödinger took this idea and by using the Lagrangian approach (a mathematical advance on Newton’s laws) came up with a wave equation in which the energy of the particle is determined by the properties of the wave function Ψ. Max Born then came up with a “rule” that stated the probability of where the particle was depended on the modulus (the distortion of the wave from the median plane) squared. Then quantum mechanics became probabilistic, and everyone argued that the wave function was a mathematical trick for making calculations.

In my opinion, there is a fly in that ointment. The problem is, if we use the de Broglie and Einstein equations we can calculate the speed at which the wave transmits, and, er, it is half the speed of the particle. Oops! It cannot represent the position of the particle because the wave and the particle are not in the same place! Interestingly, if the guidance wave (or pilot wave) is physical, to be a wave it has to oscillate and if it oscillates, it has to have energy. Think of a sea wave: the water goes up and down, but something has to make it do so, and that is the energy inherent in the wave. So I propose the guidance wave transmits the energy required by the Schrödinger equation, and the equation is that of the wave, not that of the particle. The particle is merely swept along by the wave hence has equal energy.

Therein, of course, lies the dead rat I have to swallow – where does this energy come from? It effectively requires a separate domain in another dimension that only contacts our dimensions at the wave antinode. Maybe that is too much to swallow. Notwithstanding that, in my opinion the blocking of an arm in the Mach Zehnder interferometer unambiguously requires a physical wave (or magic).

The advantages of this approach are clear. While ordinary quantum mechanics focuses on the particle, which has an uncertain position and hence leads to highly complicated mathematics that require massive computer effort, by focusing on the wave we can separate the wave components yet they have to maintain constant action, which makes calculation of chemical bonds easier. I have shown why the Born rule has to be wrong UNLESS you accept the guidance wave which falsifies the physics of one Nobel prize, and I show why two others fail the self-consistency test. I propose a very small number of new experiments that should provide results that are inconsistent with standard quantum mechanics.

Finally, to show how the methodology can be used provided certain premises hold, I take a look at nuclear structure. This is, of course, highly speculative, but if we accept the premises, the separability of wave motion (because of its fundamental linearity) shows that if we assume that the wave function of quarks in a proton behave similarly to the waves of an electron in. hydrogen atom, it turns out that deuterium appears to have the right shape and the binding energy could originate from the interference of d quark waves and the binding is electromagnetic in origin. Equally, it could be an accidental coincidence because there are some assumptions that have to hold, including that the strong force has no role in nuclear binding.

But then, with simple geometry and the assumption of quark-quark wave interference forming bonds with a charge of plus or minus 2e/3 we can show why the stable nuclei are stable, and why others are not. It is easy to show why only rather massive nuclei can emit alpha particles, and rather happily a recent determination that 10Be has structure, what it shows is reasonably consistent with my model.

Finally, I make a rather speculative proposal for what causes gravity. All of this may seem a little “over the top”, but I am reasonably happy. My guess is this will be ignored, so no need for those addicted to standard quantum mechanics to panic. The calculations are quite simple to perform, which means the priesthood of mathematical physics will reject it.

How Hot Will it Get?

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There is another climate conference, this time in in Baku, with much hand-wringing, pleas to do more, everyone will talk, and then go home and continue doing what they are doing. We are frogs in the pot. Further, with Donald Trump as President we can assume the US will do more drilling. It has yet to register with the environmentalists the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, yet our whole society depends on a substantial base load of electricity.

An interesting question discussed by Wong (Nature 632, 713) is how hot can people tolerate? Apparently, the University of Sydney has built a structure to test the limits of human tolerance, and these appear to be surprisingly low. Subjects can eat, work and essentially live inside this chamber from 5 degrees C to 55 degrees C. The upper limit for many people appears to be 34 degrees C. Of course, we can survive higher temperatures, but at a cost. As you overheat, work productivity goes down. An interesting point was the use of a fan. In damp heat, the use of a fan can reduce heart strain up to 38 degrees C, but it increases such heart strain in dry heat. One way to reduce strain is to soak your clothing with water, and it was noted that babies in prams in Sydney were more comfortable if covered with white muslin cloths that were wetted from a spray bottle from time to time. Of course, the effects can differ from different people. I recall being in South Africa in the summer and evening was coming. One of the workers came in and put on a jersey, saying he was feeling a little chilly. The temperature was 35 degrees C, but it was explained he came from the Kalahari, which is a real furnace of a place. However, one of the things you may notice is that in many Western cities, in summer temperatures of 35 degrees C are already reached. The cooking is real.

So what can be done? We know we are going to overshoot the original targets because we already have, but there is an option, at least as advocated by some, ad that is, make up for it with more aggressive carbon capture later. For more details, see Nature 634, pp 299 and 366). What do you think of that? To complicate the issue, enter the economists. Economic models include a “discount rate” that puts a higher value on near costs than long-term future costs, so it makes sense (to economists) to acquire the carbon “debt” now. The problem with that, of course, is that it merely encourages the politicians to do nothing right now and leave it for some time in the future. Lucky citizens of the future.

The problem with such a policy is there is an assumption that greatly enhanced carbon dioxide removal has surplus capacity that can be deployed rapidly. If there is such capacity, why not use it sooner, to make the problem simpler? Buried in this proposal is the assumption that the load of carbon dioxide will not get progressively worse over the time, but we know it will because it is getting worse right now.

There is also the question of whether overshoot can be reversed. Many physical systems do not respond instantly, the best known is trying to change the polarization of a magnet by applying an external current in a coil. At first not much happens, then as the current increases, suddenly it switches relatively rapidly. Think of it as if the tiny magnets inside the iron needed a significant force to make them flip past their neighbours. The phenomenon is called hysteresis, and the climate will have this in spades. Think of sea level rise that arises from excessive heat melting ice sheets. Cooling the air will not do much for sea level rise. The sea merely gets cooler. To reverse the rise, there has to be massive snow deposits in the zones where ice sheets may form again, and that will take a lot of time. Similarly, landscape is not immediately reversed. If you burn down a rain forest, you may be able to grow scrubby weeds quickly, but it would take a very long time to regenerate the rain forest.

So what does the paper conclude? Rather depressingly, more research and modelling, although to be fair they also say we need to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, starting now. As an added piece of depression, they say large scale carbon dioxide removal is the very definition of anthropogenic climate intervention (i.e. geoengineering) which raises questions about what would happen? Sorry, everyone, but we are already doing that with our emissions. We are changing the climate, and we have no real idea to what. We should at least give ourselves a chance to fix it.

Could There Be Life on Tidally Locked Planets?

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A tidally locked planet is one that is so close to the star that the angular momentum of the spin of the planet, if it had any, gets transferred by tidal interactions with the fluid surface of the star. The net result is that, like our moon, it always points one face at the star. There is no possibility of a place on the surface having a day and a night. That will mean all places have a uniform temperature! Either extremely hot or extremely cold, depending on which face one is on. However, it doesn’t have to be like that. If the planet has an atmosphere, and if something can get it started, the winds going from the hot side to the cold side tend to flow in a uniform direction and we get what are called thermal tides, and this wind drags the planet and gives it a rotation, in a retrograde direction. That could account for the retrograde spin of Venus. You may think that is so slow it might as well be locked, but Venus is a poor example because the atmosphere is so thick there are only very gentle winds on the surface. However, this raises the problem that if the planet is tidally locked, it may not have an atmosphere.

Anyway, let is restrict ourselves to tidally locked. The side facing the star gets continual heat; the opposite side is extremely cold. In between there is a ribbon of eternal twilight. The models invariably include the possibility of winds transferring heat from the hot side to the cold side, but if this happens and the planet remains tidally locked, perforce it has not got thermal tides, which means either the thermal tide models are wrong or the planet has not got an atmosphere.

What happens next depends on the heat from the star. Many of these planets circle a red dwarf, and the star does not send out much heat anyway. It will also depend on the nature of the atmosphere. The biggest problem for life would be that all the water in the atmosphere would snow out on the cold side, which would convert the planet into a desert. To manage life, such a tidally locked planet must efficiently transfer heat from the dayside to the nightside. At the very least, in my opinion, this will require a good supply of nitrogen in the atmosphere because if the atmosphere was like that of Venus with mostly CO2, this too could snow out on the cold side.

This problem has naturally offered a good source of material for the scientific paper publication industry and it has the advantage that predictions can be made that will not be falsified in the life of the scientist. So what does the modelling suggest? The first question is how much water is there? If there is enough for massive oceans, then ocean currents could move heat, and they are far more efficient than air. But suppose this does not occur. Now habitability would be restricted to the ribbon zone. But would it be habitable?

The first problem is with plants. Animals need those as a food source but how much growth would there be in perpetual twilight, not helped by the fact that if the star is a red dwarf, most of the energy comes in wavelengths too long to support photosynthesis as we know it. Could life develop a means of using a larger number of less energetic photons to carry out photosynthesis. If not, it is difficult to see how the molecules necessary for life could be synthesised. The next problem is that in the twilight zone the intensity of the incoming light is too low. If the light is coming in parallel to the ground, very little hits the ground. It may be there could be isolated examples on hill faces, but now we have the problem of water and other nutrients.

The overall conclusion would seem to be that life is improbable, but then we have considered life to be similar to ours. Can we imagine a different life system? I can’t, but one never knows. The reason I can’t is so many things have to go right, and most of them are achieved through strands of RNA, with ribozymes as the first catalyst. I show how this evolved on our planet in my ebook “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis” but that needed a planet that was formed more or less like Earth was. If life can’t form a comparable catalyst, I do not believe that life would be possible.

Antibiotic Resistance

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There was a reminder in a recent edition of Nature (Dance, vol 632, 494) that pointed out that the current crisis with antibiotics leads to the requirement familiar to those who follow Lewis Carol – we have to run increasingly fast just to stay in the same place. There is plenty of blame to go around for why we are in this predicament, but that is pointless. We are here: live with it.

It is nearly a century ago the penicillin was discovered, and shortly after, a number of antibiotics were discovered from soil microbes, particularly from Actinomyces bacteria. For some time we were winning the war; microbial infections could easily be cured. But then the inevitable happened: unable to resist the “miracle drugs” they were badly misused. When I was a chemistry undergrad, I recall the lecturer being rather pleased to point out that most of the antibiotics then in use were basically lactams, and chemistry could play a myriad of substitution tricks so the bacteria would never win. That was the sort of hubris that played out. What eventuated was that the microbes developed resistance to the new variants relatively quickly, which made researching new variants a financial loser for the pharmaceutical companies. They claimed they could never recover the development costs before the drug became no longer desirable. Apparently in 2019, 1.27 million deaths world-wide could be attributed to drug-resistant infections. This is a serious problem. But there are possible routes for development.

The first is somewhat obvious. In the early days, the search was for broad-spectrum antibiotics: the wonder drug that would cure all infections. During the screening of natural products from the Actinomyces bacteria, some might have been rejected because they were too narrow spectrum, and only cured specific infections. These could be re-examined. In some ways, provided you know the bacterium, the specific cure has the obvious advantage that it will be much harder for bacteria to generate resistance. They are not exposed to antibiotics that are only partially successful against them.

A further route comes from the fact that previously antibiotics were developed from the few bacteria that are easily grown in the lab. The next strategy is to work out how to grow some of the other bacteria and hope we discover new antibiotics. A further possibility is a new method for testing whether bacteria are likely to contain antibiotics. This would accelerate the discovery process by a factor of about ten. But we still have to select bacteria that actually contain antibiotics that are useful.

Another possibility is to take a somewhat different approach. The question is, how did we overcome infections prior to antibiotics, and the answer is than many animal proteins and peptides have antimicrobial activity. Of course, the microbes have been exposed to those from humans as long as we have been here, so resistance is inbuilt. But what about extinct animals, such as the woolly mammoth? The current microbes may well have lost the ability to defend against these peptides. In answer to the point that we do not have a good supply of woolly mammoths, that is irrelevant. If we know the structure of the peptide, we can synthesise it, and we would always do that anyway. The reason we would need the mammoth flesh is to obtain the structure of desirable peptides. In trying to develop such peptides, AI is also useful. If it can isolate the features common to more than one peptide antibiotic, it might be able to design new smaller peptides that are easier to make and do the job. Apparently, a small number of such drugs are coming onto the market.

The next approach is to have a cocktail, hoping more than one would work synergistically. There are also non-antibiotics that might help, thus one of the compounds found in strawberries helps remove a protective film from bacteria. This won’t kill the bacterium but it might help other antibiotics to gain access. Finally, because many possibilities are somewhat bacterium specific, we need a rapid test to work out what causes the infection. If the physician has to wait a day or so for the lab to provide an answer, the patient may be in deep trouble.

So, overall, there are possibilities, but a lot more work needs to be done to convert them into practical uses.

Geoengineering and Climate Change

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In the previous post I suggested that we might be forced to consider geoengineering as a means of dealing with climate change. This came up in a recent article in Science (doi: 10.1126/science.z016868) and the article was less than keen on the idea. A summary of the arguments is as follows.

A study in Geophysical Research Letters proposed that the best way to reflect radiation was to put 5 million tonne of diamond dust into the atmosphere each year, and if this was done, it should cool the planet by 1.6 degrees C. There was one problem cited: until the end of the century it would cost $200 trillion. That even makes the US national debt look reasonable.

We know that such temperature drops are possible, thus the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo cooled the planet by as much as 0.5 degrees C for several years. The usual explanation was that the sulphur dioxide emitted rose to the stratosphere and got oxidised to sulphate. Then the objections came, namely the use of sulphur would cause acid rain. That is not good, so maybe sulphur dioxide is not the optimal material. Nevertheless, a point was overlooked. The objections keep saying we don’t know what the unintended consequences would be. Well, if  Mount Pinatubo lowered the overall temperatures by 0.5 degrees C for five years we should have some idea. The volcano has given us a huge amount of data so what were the adverse effects then? No, they don’t want to go there.

The reason why diamond dust was so good was that it did not clump so it settled more slowly. The issue they obviously overlooked was that when the material does come down, you are going to have microdiamonds everywhere. You may have heard of the suspected problems with microplastics. Well, if you think they will be around for a long time, think again about diamond. Other particles considered were aluminium and lime.

The accusation was that sulphur was the second worst material considered in their climate model, seemingly because it warmed the stratosphere but could perturb climate patterns, such as El Niño. Maybe, but that is changing anyway. The practical advantage of sulphur is it is a gas and can more easily be taken up and dispersed. They are also the only materials for which we have data, thanks to volcanic activity.

Meanwhile, the study looked at other materials, such as calcite, rutile, anastase, and concluded that calcite was a poor choice because it did not last as long up there. The time was 0.86 yrs as opposed to 1.04 years for diamond. But that leaves open the question, is that sufficient reason not to use something that will certainly be harmless later on. Other materials, such as zinc oxide were neglected. Some were rejected because they might heat the stratosphere more, but is that realistic? Radiation to space, hence cooling, occurs in the upper atmosphere, while blocking radiation from reaching the ground, where it gets converted to heat, can’t be bad. Further, they argued against calcite because the particles had a greater radius and hence settled faster. Um, can’t we reduce the size further?

Then, the reason for scientists opposing geoengineering research: “they worry about the unforeseen consequences of large-scale implementation and think it siphons researchers and funding away from reducing carbon emissions and climate impacts.” In short, they don’t want to lose their funding. Meanwhile, they have been working away and taking money for thirty years and have achieved what? Everything is getting worse.

More Bad News on the Climate

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“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster.” Thus starteth “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth”  Ripple et al., Bioscience https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087. We have predicted what would happen, they state, but “we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (https://press.un.org/en/2024/sgsm22319.doc.htm ), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (United Nations Environment Programme. 2023. Emissions Gap Report 2023: Broken Record: Temperatures Hit New Highs, yet World Fails to Cut Emissions (Again). UNEP.)”. Global mean temperatures have been at record levels for half of the last two years. They argue that emissions caused by humans are the major cause, and 90% from the burning of fossil fuels.

Lowlights include a doubling of heat-related mortality in the US, there were four floods that did at least a billion dollars of damage in the US, while temperatures reached 50 degrees C in parts of India. Coral reefs are dying, we are generating toxic orange rivers in Arctic streams. This is essentially because permafrost thaw liberates iron sulphate, which leads to acidic water that kills species that live in the streams. Of the climate scientists, only 6% believe the Paris accord target is physically achievable now. In short we have started cooking ourselves and like then proverbial frog in the pot, we do not appreciate what is happening.

The question then is, what should scientists do? As the article says, attitudes that are pessimistic lead to an embracing  of a sense of helplessness, which undermines the motivation for action. On the other hand, optimism merely leads people to sit back, decide there is no need for action, and so little happens. The problem then is, as the paper states, “a dire assessment is an honest assessment.”

So what to do? One method that has received more funding is solar geoengineering, the idea being to reflect a greater percentage of the incoming sunlight back to space. However, this will be bogged down by concerns over unintended consequences, and ethical issues. Critics argue it may disrupt weather patterns. Of course it might but it now leads to all this money being spent on climate models. The basic driver of weather is heat transfer, and the flow of heat from hot to cold regions. If the models cannot make a tolerable guess at what happens if you cool a region by such reflection, then what is the point of the models? Secondly, why can’t we make a low intensity start. During 9/11, for a few days aircraft stopped flying over the US, the high altitude contrails ceased, and ground temperatures rose by up to 1.5 degrees C on average during the day in regions where more aircraft flew, but got cooler during the night. Sure, it could be an accidental coincidence, but the world did not come to an end. The Earth’s climate is not some delicate object like a pencil standing on its end. The reason we have this problem is we are emitting at least 40 billion tonne of CO2 per annum. Yes, there are ethical considerations, but give us a break: we have a terrible problem with the poor of Asia having to live through terrible times, and we worry about there might be some minor consequence somewhere.

The environmentalists think the answer is simply to reduce emissions. This shows the ability to be logical yet lose contact with reality. The Paris agreement had everybody promising to reduce emissions “some time in the future” and look what happened. The rate of producing emissions increased! We have to appreciate that no politician is going to deliberately turn off the economy to please the doomsayers or to avoid a problem fifty years into the future. Like the frog, politicians are only concerned with the now (and the next election).

So what do I think? I think our economy is locked into the present. It has taken about 150 years to get to where we are now on oil and we cannot just discard it. The generation of energy from solar and wind may or may not contribute, but it will be a minor contribution. We can slowly convert electricity generation to nuclear, in my opinion, preferably molten salt, but it costs huge amounts of money and time to convert existing infrastructure into new but different infrastructure. There  will be a few local possibilities that help a country, but not the world. An example might be the proposal to have more geothermal energy here by boring deeper into the plate boundary. Certainly, with the Pacific plate diving under the Australian plate, there is no shortage of energy in the near term. Of course, this gets the expected political response: geologists were fired from our Geological Survey to save government money, savings need to pay for tax cuts in the previous election bribe. My conclusion is that in the medium term we shall have to have a bout of geoengineering, not because it is a particularly desirable technique, but it is the ONLY one that can be implemented tolerably quickly. It is also not permanent, but it has to be done thoughtfully.

Why Does the Earth Alone Have Continents and Oceans?

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In the previous post I stated that once we have worked out what the ancient atmospheres were, we can see why Earth has continents and oceans. The question then is, why is this not obvious and commonly found in the text books? The answer is sad. Geologists, working on oxidation equilibria, argued that since ancient basalts are similar to modern basalts, so too would the gases emitted by volcanoes be similar. Then fact that we had actual examples of the ancient gases was ignored. There were two reasons for this. The first is they jumped to conclusions when interpreting some rock chemistry, and second, the deuterium to proton ratio in Earth’s water is similar to that in some chondrites. Therefore the water came from chondrites, and so would the gases. The answer to how did the initial gases get into Earth’s interior and be expelled from volcanoes, the evidence for which is unambiguous, was met with much arm-waving. The following is NOT commonly accepted, but is what I concluded while writing my ebook “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis”.

If we accept that the volatiles were accreted as solids, water also had to be accreted. To get continents, the felsic components, which basically comprise aluminosilicates of calcium, sodium and potassium, have to unite, but in the accretion disk, particles are very small. To phase separate they have to diffuse into lumps, and diffusion rates are inversely proportional to viscosity and pressure. In the lower mantle, viscosity is about 10^19 times water, and pressure is high. Diffusion is very slow, which is why planets such as Mars do not have significant aluminosilicates that have separated from the basaltic rock. In my opinion, such phase separation is best carried out in space, where the pressure is so much smaller. Which gets us to why Mars does not have an iron core such as the other rocky planets.

Assume that material will flow much faster if it is preformed into lumps that melt. To be preformed, it had to melt in space, which requires pure iron to reach 1538 degrees C. The only time iron could get that hot at a relevant distance from the star was while the star was forming. The great inflow of gas would be sufficient to heat the gas to that temperature a little further than 1 A.U., which is the Earth-Sun distance. That means Mars did not get a metallic nickel/iron core because the material never got hot enough. So what else happened?

One of the reasons there are so many forms of rocks is that polymers of silicates can get very long. A lump of crystalline quartz, free of fractures, is essentially one molecule. For reasons of the ability to closely pack and thus maximize the heat of interaction, the larger the polymer the more likely a mixture is to phase separate, like oil and water. Because calcium is bigger than iron or magnesium, at about 1250 degrees C calcium silicate tends to phase separate from olivines and pyroxenes. At somewhere about 1500 degrees C, calcium aluminosilicates begin to phase separate. Then, when the star started to finish accretion because the gas flow was much slower, everything cooled down. Collisions of rocks would make dust, and not, as some seem to think, make bigger rocks. In the long history of warfare, with many very large rocks with serious kinetic energy being thrown at walls, never has the wall absorbed the rock and got stronger. In all the examples we know of asteroids colliding, what we get are families of smaller asteroids with shapes we can conceptually reassemble into pre-collisional bodies.

That meant that rocky bodies had to form by gently coming together, followed by something joining them together. The something was the dust made by the brittle silicates during collisions. Calcium silicate is more or less Portland cement, which uses one equivalent of water to form a concrete, the water coming from the gas . Some calcium aluminosilicates use fifteen times as much water. So Mars formed by calcium silicate binding the local rocks and the core formed from iron and probably many oxides. Earth formed from calcium aluminosilicates binding basalts, and this formation of concretes happened once the temperatures in the disk collapsed to roughly current temperatures, so it was cool enough to set cements. Later, when the planet formed and the interior became hot, the molten lumps of iron flowed to the centre and the less dense aluminosilicates flowed to the surface.

The reason Mars does not have the big iron core is as the interior heated, the water that set the calcium silicate rusted the iron dust. The reason Venus is short of continents (I predict that Ishtar and Aphrodite Terrae will be granitic) is that it was too warm to set as much cement, but it grew because basalt density was higher, both because it was closer to the Sun. Mercury had to form by a slightly different mechanism. So that is why we have continents and oceans. The same chemistry will offer the same possibility in any other exosystem with the same sequence of conditions. Thus the conditions for an Earth with plenty of water and continents is a star roughly the size of the Sun accreting at the same rate the Sun did, followed by a period with a cool accretion disk, followed by the star ejecting its accretion disk within something like a million years. There will be more Earth-like planets, but they will be far apart because they are not common.

Ebook Discount

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From October 17 – 24, Reviviscence will be on discount US 99c, including all countries and most platforms. Intended as standalone, it is also a sequel to Spoliation. Jonas Stryker is given command of a fleet to end a space rebellion, but when he encounters one rebel ship, half his fleet turn on the other half then flee. While the remaining Space Corps’ ships are being repaired, those on Earth who supply the rebels must be arrested and the rebel base located. Identifying the rebels on Earth is a problem, as possible leaks are killed and clues destroyed. A tale of investigation, greed, corruption and honour, set in the inner solar system and on Earth, with murder, space battles, and the science of asteroids.

Links:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNR55HG6

Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1482922

Apple:  https://books.apple.com/us/book/x/id6472733551

B&N:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/2940167648746

Kobo:   https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/Search?Query=9798215638132