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The Earth is Getting Fatter
murk1e writes "The BBC News service has an article which reveals that the Earth is getting fatter. It is well known that the Earth is slightly wider at the equator than at the poles, it is less well known that for years, the Earth has been becoming more spherical. Now it appears that the trend has reversed, and the Earth is getting more obese (in the sense of shape change rather than changing mass). Perhaps the Earth should sue?"
This is curious. At first I was going to write this off as yet another natural phenomenon I don't understand. But now I'm thinking that it's pretty odd how the Earth is suddenly "changing direction" like that.
Could this be another example of the effects of mankind on the planet? Perhaps all of our oil drilling and coal mining is destroying the ground beneath our feet as much as the air we breathe! It would make sense that when we remove the Earth's contents from the ground, we destablize the Earth's crust, thus causing expansion, which is exaggerated at the equator.
How long before we finally go to far, and the Earth dissolves entirely? In a few hundred years, we might just be an asteroid belt between Mars and Venus. Now that I think about it, the Universe might be better off with out us. Something to think about.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
That said, I have it on good authority he's the guy who wrote the screen play for The Core It's only missing Kathy Ireland, or someone else equally interchangable, and midgets, preferably australian.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
It might be responsibile for the global warming. I mean since the earth is getting bigger; it means it's getting closer to the sun in a way; so perhaps that's why the Earth is warming up.
Feeling any cooler?
An interesting "violation" of the 2nd law of thermodynamics....since the only other natural phenomenon to have done this, afaik, is life itself, one can only assume that this is an effect of life on Earth, barring some other wierd cause.
it is less well known that for years, the Earth has been becoming more spherical. Now it appears that the trend has reversed, and the Earth is getting more obese
... that yo-yo dieting just doesn't work. Eat less and exercise.
"It is well known that the Earth is slightly wider at the equator than at the poles"
Now isn't that strange. A sphere that has a smaller radius at the top than the center.
Maybe we can make an equation for that....Hmmm
COS X
That doesn't change much - just a few millimeters - from year to year. Tiny as that sounds, satellite tracking allows scientists to make extremely precise measurements of the planet's shape.
Changes in the shape influence the strength of the Earth's gravitational pull from place to place, said Benjamin Chao of NASA-Goddard. Those gravitational changes in turn influence the positions of satellites.
And that's something they can measure to within centimeters. "We shoot laser beams to the satellites," he said. The time it takes for the laser light to bounce off reflective surfaces and back to the ground tells them precisely how far their satellites are, said Chao, who collaborated in the findings. He and Cox put the satellite positions into a computer, he said. That's how they got their surprise finding.
This is probably just a normal oscillation the Earth undergoes, driven by the impetus of the various gravitational influences it experiences over time. If we waited around long enough, it would probably start going back.
In fact, just thinking about it, it's virtually inconceivable that it wouldn't oscillate this way. Consider the Earth as a giant drop of water cruising through space. (Note that on a plantary scale, everything is liquid, which is why the surface is smooth. If the Earth were the size of a cue ball, it would be the smoothest cue ball ever made. This is also why blowing up a planet and seeing huge chunks fly away is stupid; it's basically a liquid, it should 'blow up' like one.) Of course it oscillates, what with Saturn and Jupiter and innumerable other influences constantly 'twanging' it.
The only real question is what the period is.
Note that it is utterly inconceivable that humanity has had any significant effect on this process simply by moving mass around. Do a compution on the total mass we've ever moved around, at all. Be generous; go ahead and assume 2002-level industrial output for 10,000 years of human history, which will be an overestimate by about a factor of 5,000. Now divide by the mass of the Earth. Then remember to use your brain when thinking about human effects in the future. (Some things we can and do affect negatively. There are other things we could literally not hope to effect in a million years. Moving a significant fraction of the planet is one of those. Recall the planet is a huge sphere of which "the surface" is itself only a tiny, tiny fraction...)
They made a typo. The earth is getting FLATTER. http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatea rthsociety.htm
- Satellites Reveal a Mystery of Large Change in Earth's Gravity
if you like the globe in the images there's a better one on the same web site called the Blue MarbleSatellite data since 1998 indicates the bulge in the Earth's gravity field at the equator is growing, and scientists think that the ocean may hold the answer to the mystery of how the changes in the trend of Earth's gravity are occurring.
and don't forget to check out the Natural Hazards
.:: proud supporter of dc united
Life isn't a violation of the second law, either. Put energy into a system, and you can reduce entropy locally. The only things that violate the second law are perpetual motion machines. (Small statistical glitches, like those reported last week, aren't violations either, as the second law is statistical.)
My understanding of this is that it is not the solid earth's physical shape that is geting flatter. It is the gravitational field. Previously, both the gravitational field and the solid earth were getting more spherical due to rebounding of the crust and mantle after the last ice age. Essentially, the load of glacial ice was removed from the polar regions, and the ground below was able to relax. The finding being reported here is that the graviational field has now stopped getting rounder and is getting flatter again. This is in spite of the fact that polar post-glacial rebound is continuing. So, some other mechanism is suspected. The researchers working on this think it is due to very large scale (in distance and time) oscillations in ocean currents that is moving mass (of ocean) from high to low latitudes.
p um pkin/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/08/01/earth.
Seriously.. I was reading through this and I was thinking.. "This is some seriously melodramatic poetic crap.. sorta like that tps12 guy".. then I looked up..
Really guy.. your getting a name for yourself at this point. What do you do.. and how did you get such an early post on this thing? Did you start writing poetry on the subject in the hopes that an article would get posted?
I think the crappy satelites are just slowly falling to the earth...it would make scense because the gravitational field is increasing.
as usual the rest of the world is becoming americanized
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
But how is that energy being "put into" the said system?
(I'm no physicist, and will freely admit to having a less-than-perfect understanding of all this, so I question as much to learn as anything.)
I guess what I'm getting at is that, for life to have started simply and become complex, something would have had to "put energy into" life. But how can nature put energy into life when life is already, perhaps, of a higher energy state than is the rest of nature?
The Earth is not a closed system, we receive most of our energy from the Sun, and a lot of energy is radiated off of our planet, as well.
Variations of entropy locally on Earth are not significant by comparison.
The sun.
But how can nature put energy into life when life is already, perhaps, of a higher energy state than is the rest of nature?
You shouldn't bandy about terms like "energy state" -- they have precise meanings. Anyhow, "nature" isn't giving our planet energy; the sun is. It is very hot and bright, and spits out lots of photons, some of which hit the Earth. Organisms, directly or indirectly, use that energy to do work and to reduce entropy locally. No violation of physical laws.
And it's no problem to have order arise out of chaos so long as there's energy available to use... and even if there isn't, order can arise spontaneously in small systems out of disorder, thanks to the statistical nature of the second law.