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When Microbes Ate the Ocean
museumpeace writes "When /. discussed a story about microbes that could break down water as a hydrogen source, many commentors went off on a tangent joking about runaway germs eating the oceans. Now, prof Joe Kirschvink and students at CalTech propose that indeed, the worst iceage ever, which nearly ended life on earth 2.3 billion years ago, was the result of algae evolving the ability to break down water and flooding the atmosphere with oxygen. The absence of oxygen consuming organisms at that time is said to have lead to destruction of atmospheric methane which had hitherto warmed the earth. The professor concludes: 'We haven't had a Snowball in the past 630 million years, and because the sun is warmer now it may be harder to get into the right condition. But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.'"
The last few months I have been doing some research into the trolling phenomenon on slashdot.org. In order to do this as thoroughly as possible, I have written both normal and troll posts, 1st posts, etc., both logged in and anonymously, and I have found these rather shocking results:
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
Not true. Some Slashdot Janitors and Crack-addicted Mods have modded down posts of mine that were posted with a default '-1'. Jamie was made aware of this according to these journal entries. Don't even get us started on unlimited editor mod points and the Janitors that abuse those rights.
Michael Loves Me!
You mention how negative moderations are done more frequently than positive. Well, I certainly would like to observe that this is a bad thing. It seems that michael had to come in and shoot the notion down. Perhaps the editors realize that negative moderations are a bad idea and are too arrogant to change it? You'll notice that other news sites tend to follow the path of public, positive-only moderation. I guess that would be like giving in.
Negative moderation has got to stop. It only hurts the forums and does absolutely nothing to encourage intelligent posting. If anything, it only encourages more trolling as trolls giggle with delight when some jackass gives them a negative score.
Change the system.
Why bother.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Sorry if I am not good at understanding the whole context of english speaking. I enjoy just what I can understand. But I guess that intolerance and expectance of perfection are what are common things that are leading these times to this flat-black&white world. Everybody is afraid of getting their intentions of starting flying missinterpreted. So it is easier to follow the cattle and risk less. I propose to increase opinions, to be able to ask for votes to change things. Technical improvements must follow social ones
Emperor Marcus Aurelius once said: "If you can't change people, you must endure them..." It is very easy to destroy what others build without the compromise of proposing something new in exchange. Less ideals and more actions! (if I break something it is fair to break something inside myself at the same time) Things must be hard for everyone during these days, aren't them?
Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
Ever since I modded up "The first Slashdot troll post investigation", I haven't been offered a chance to metamod. Has anyone else noticed this, or is it a coincidence/based on something else?
It didn't end all life on Earth, and it probably wouldn't if it happened again.
While this sounds pretty bad, it seems that this was nature's way of "terraforming" our planet. It seems these bacteria might be handy for naturally creating other worlds we can inhabit. After all, we already have organisms that breathe oxygen.
But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.
But according to Orson Welles, its also the best defense we could ask for!
Sigs are for Terrorists.
It couldn't happen again, of course, at least not in remotely the same way, because we now have a load of things, such as animals, that consume oxygen. Has it occurred to anyone that we might be able to use this as a source of hydrogen for a hydrogen economy??? It's indirectly solar power, guys.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
...is to just rename the planet. If we start calling Earth by a new name, say "Hoth" for example, the Earth will become an ice planet. Just get a significant number of the inhabitants of the planet to believe anything and it will come to pass. The boiling point of water for instance could easily be lowered or raised if we all, as a collective, just believed it to be possible for water to boil at, say... 90 degrees F. It's simple really. Just basic quantum fizziks with a little new ageyness thrown in for good measure. We now return you to your regularly scheduled propaganda.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I gotta get out more... I read the headline as when Microsoft Ate the Ocean.
Determing the cause of a global freeze which we think happened 2.3 billion years ago has got to be pretty tough. Their actual article is not linked, so does anyone have a link or an idea about how they determined this?
But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.
There's one unwavering faith I have in the human race: The ability to destroy things. That evil algae doesn't stand a chance!
life is already doomed on earth, go figure.
lameness filter thwarted.
The combustion of materials for fire are rather sensitive to the percentage of oxygen in our atmosphere. Another +1% of O2 and we'd have a fireball raging, another -1% of O2 and things would not ignite in the free atmosphere. Subsequently if these microbes/algae get started with creating more O2 it'd simply be consumed by more fire.
When are we going to realize that humans infest this planet like mold infests cheese? Sure, we make the milk into a nice, homey swiss. But after a while, even cheese rots, taken over by the critters more comfortable than are we in our own poisonous byproducts. We're not keeping the place tidy enough already, and the plants that will survive us are probably slavering at the chance to feed on our rotting corpses. What lovely mulch we'll make.
--
make install -not war
Humans are very far from being the worst polluters Earth has seen. Algae-- whether this new theory was true or not-- have overall been much, much worse. Before the runaway growth of Algae, it was not normal for living things to breathe oxygen. Life had to transition from using carbon dioxide to using oxygen in order to survive sharing a planet with the algae. Most of it couldn't transition, and died.
This was a really long time ago though.
I could write a short story (plot stolen from Heinlein) about "The Bio-engineered Energy Source That Got Away And Ate The Planet" in a heartbeat.
Shit, there's about 17 research projects to do this funded ritght now:
1) Sunlight + Microbes == Hydrogen
2) ???
3) Profit!!!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Bill Paxton as the divorced Oceanographer who's trying to balance being a father to his 18 year-old son with his job.
Susan Sarandon as the head of the Governments Task Force on the Environment. She's tough and passionate but is there anything she can do?
Alec Baldwin as the President whos up for re-election. Can he fend off the powerful lobbyists yet still keep his office?
Jennifer Lopez is the scientist with a solution, but no one will listen due to her reputation as being an alarmist.
Wil Wheaton with a cameo as The Beaver.
Steven Spielberg is rumored to be interested.
Definitely must be Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle!
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
....in Stephenson's Zodiac?
So no studio will produce it. They only do remakes now.
But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.
In the past 30 odd years that I'm running around on this globe, this planet has been threatened so often with destruction that I'm not remotely worried about it anymore. On the scale of the universe we're nothing, both in size and in age.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to keep the planet in the best possible shape of course!
bash$
Did you study arts at college? Whether something burns depends on the heat you expose it to, the type of material itself, and also (yes) the availability of oxidiser (O2 in the air). Methane gas, coal, and all your other favourite fossil fuels will burn in 19%-O2 air just fine. They might produce marginally more carbon monoxide, but they wouldn't just stop.
If combustion was that sensitive, I think most candles wouldn't burn because they'd use up the oxygen around them to quickly. And blowing gently on a flame would always put it out rather than increase it, because there's less O2 (about 16%?) and more CO2 in your exhaled breath.
This is not a sig
This is not to say that it wouldn't have consequences. The likelihood of natural fires after lightning strikes and other events would naturally change if the oxygen level changed, but so would anything that changed the frequency of thunderstorms themself or any other climate factor, or the type of vegetation.
The oxygen level has changed significantly enough during the history of landliving vertebrae to be reason not to worry. And as humans cope with several thousand meters with some performance degradation, but no total collapse, we wouldn't even have to worry for our own direct survival.
I believe! I believe! Aw crap! my blood's boiling!
I can verify that cigarette lighters cease to ignite when CO2 reaches 5%. Oxygen levels are still around 19% at this point (assuming proportional displacement of nitrogen and oxygen). People lose consciousness and eventually stop breathing when the oxygen level falls to about 16%.
Cheers, Phil
The article points out that if Earth was a bit farther away from the Sun, then the Carbon Dioxide would have frozen out of the atmosphere, thus preventing that particular greenhouse gas from bringing on a subsequent warming period. Mars has almost exactly that situation. One or the other of the poles is always cold enough to freeze Carbon Dioxide out of its atmosphere. Too little greenhouse gas ==>>planet stays too cold==>> water permenantly locked up as ice.
With the discoveries of the last couple of years we know Mars has lots of water and Carbon Dioxide, and Methane to boot! AND we know that temperatures permitted liquid surface water in the distant past.
Is this reasonable? Could cyanobacteria have doomed Mars? anyone?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"all life on Earth would likely be destroyed"
this guy just lost all credibility
While your numbers are dodgy, you do have a point. If our cheap hydrogen making bacteria go out of control over the oceans, we really just have to light the resultant cloud of gas on fire. Probably look really bad from space to see flaming oceans, but it beats slime-green, I guess.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
I have nothing useful to say, I just want to thank for some very intresting information :), but I have no mod points today :)
Wouldn't that be Algae underlords?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Wonder what would happen if we eliminated 'overpopulation' of the human species? Perhaps the lack of oxygen consuming beings would cause an ice age? Would that be a kicker.
The basic tenets of Sokal's postmodern theory state that this is so. For example: before people observed boats going over the horizon, the grand consensus was that the Earth was flat, therefore it was so. Only after people widely agreed that the earth was round, was it then actually round. It's the same elsewhere, too, eg: the sky is blue because we agree on what "blue" actually means. A small minority contends that the sky isn't always blue, like at night, but they have no voice. Therefore the sky is blue is taught as "fact."
Dr. Hoenikker unavailable for comment.
the point is, rather, this bacteria would also produce hydrogen. Which tends to rise ... to whatever point in the ionosphere where it will become convenient to recombine back ... into water. So there - more rain and some interesting aurorae away above the oceans.
I am interested more in how the heck that bacteria would get the energy to break down water. Seems like a heck of an inefficient metabolic cycle to me - unless it's actually using either hydrogen or oxygen instead of plain releasing them.
It's been known for a long time that the oxygen in earth's atmosphere first arose as the result of microbial action. It's pretty self-evident that that must have gone along with major climatic changes. What appears to be new about this story is that they link a particular glaciation event to this change in the planet's atmosphere.
The scientific details aside, this story is an important reminder: our global climate is not necessarily stable. Earth could become a frozen snowball again, or it could become like Venus. Furthermore, we don't know what would trigger either transition (it's possible, for example, that short term global warming leads to long-term freezing).
The best way of preventing that for the time being is to drastically reduce our changes to the planet's atmosphere because we know that, without human intervention, the global climate has at least supported higher life forms for hundreds of millions of years.
The absence of oxygen consuming organisms at that time is said to have lead to destruction of atmospheric methane which had hitherto warmed the earth.
So if I am generating methane I'm really saving the planet? Will someone explain this to my wife?
FLR
"I have got to tell you the most important thing you've ever heard. I've got to tell you now, and I've got to tell you in that pub there."
"Why?"
"Because you're going to need a very stiff drink."
The only difference is that, instead of Vogons, now it's algae (not that the two differ in many ways).
"Would you say its time to start cracking open each others skulls and feasting on the goo inside?"
"Yes, Yes, I would Kent"
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
Nice way to package up a theory that there was life on mars and simultaneously answer the "what happened to all the water" question.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Title would be "Amoebic Shark". :)
For about 80% of the last 540 million years the earth was about 10C warmer than now. We are presently in an ice age.
The earth was completely frozen over about 1 billion years ago and this ice age lasted probably about 1/2 billion years. Most likely it waxed and waned. When the oceans are completely frozen over they cannot absorb CO2 and the levels build up to over 100x what they are now. This is the change that the paleoclimate shows is required to lift the temperature enough to start thawing the oceans. By looking at this we can see the global warming folks are out to lunch.
In any event - the CO2 is released by volcanizm and these processes continue even though the planet is frozen over. When the levels get high enough to melt the ice then the CO2 starts to be absorbed and ends up in the carbon sinks. This can cause the earth to tip back into an ice age and the oceans can freeze over again.
Mixed into this equation is the role of water vapour. When the earth is fozen over - there is effetively no water vapour in the atmosphere. If one looks at the ABSOLUTE HUMIDITY CURVES one can see that below zero there is effectively no water vapour in the atmosphere. This is why it is so cold at the top of mountains.
So - as the oceans freeze over then the H2O in the atmosphere is also lost which accelerates the cooling of the planet.
At the present moment the earth would have to freeze down to near the tropics in order to flip us into a completely frozen over ice ball. There is enough water vapour especially in the humid sub tropics to trap enough heat that this is quite unlikely.
However it is very likely that we will see the advancing of another period of glaciation because there have been about 20 or so in the last 2+ million years.
This being said - eventually our current ice age will end and the planet will warm up about 10C. When this happens the poles will lose their ice caps - water vapour will form at high latitudes and lock the planet into a warm period which in the past has lasted typically for million of years.
The reasons for this are not completely clear. Dr. Tim Paterson from Carlton University has published that the orbit of the solar system in the galaxy may be the driving factor. The theory is that cosmic radiation increases the cloud cover which reflects energy thus cooling the planet.
It is also likely that the amount of land at high elevation is a significant factor. The earth was much warmer 30 million years ago than now. At that time we did not have the high Denver Plateau - the Tibetain plateau and most of our modern mountains such as the Rockies, Pyrenees, Alps, Andes, Himilaian and hellenic ranges were not formed.
Land at high elevation reflects energy into space - which is why you can freeze to death at the top of mount Everest for instance in spite of the fact it is in the subtropics and it is the middle of May. Furthermore the cold scrubs the water vapour.
At low elevation water vapour functions as a fairly effective blanket and furthermore in the tropics for instance at 40C it will be in concentrations of over 70,000 parts per million (eg 7%).
Water Vapour in fact is the 3rd most abundant atmospheric gas.
Compare this to the CO2 levels of 370 PPM.
If we were to increase CO2 levels by over 100x then we get CO2 into the range of 37,000 ppm and that this level it can do the job that water vapour is doing now. Note that at 19x it cannot. This is proven by the Ordovician ice age where in spite of CO2 levels between 13x and 19x greater than now - the earth cooled by about 10C and an ice age similar to what we have now developed.
At this time we also had a period of mountain building: The Taconic Orogeny.
One last point. Most of our global warming folks are looking at data that goes back no longer than human history. While this may seem to be a long time - it is not significant.
If one were to map the pages of the Encyclopeadia Britannica to the last 540 million years
The boiling point of water for instance could easily be lowered or raised if we all, as a collective, just believed it to be possible for water to boil at, say... 90 degrees F.
We'd have to get rid of a bit of excess atmosphere. It's doable, but we'd have to be careful, otherwise we might have to deal with the messy effects of explosive decompression
Oh wait. We don't have:
- any evidence
- no scientific proof
THAT is the problem with science today.
A good minority of people already believe water boils at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That'd probably be a better target.
Quite right, the +/-1% was most likely incorrect. The source, I cannot recall. That's what I get for replying to /. before coffee.
..." hrmm, nope, can't think of anything to combine GWBush/Iraq/Microsoft/Intel/Apple/NataliePortman, better have another coffee.
After coffee I would have written something like "It'll be okay because the Iraq invasion and subsequent burnoffs along with
I've seen this idea -- that slightly higher or lower concentrations of oxygen in our atmosphere would mean huge fireballs or no fire at all, respectively -- put forth before. I'm starting to suspect it's some kind of modern myth. I found nothing on Snopes.com though.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
is that these organisms, being carbon-based lifeforms, consist of more than just water, so they need to consume nutrients besides water to multiply, and probably just to survive at all.
As long as those nutrients remain available, the organisms can go on converting water, but as soon as the available amount of nutrients starts falling, the population growth will decrease as well.
Even if we suppose for the moment that the organisms are immortal and are able to survive on water and solar energy alone, they can never multiply beyond a certain point, at which the nutrients required to multiply are exhausted. The water conversion rate will then be proportional to the size of the (stable) population. It is not hard to imagine a process countering the water conversion taking hold at that time.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Arthur: What does it say?
Brother Maynard : It says: "I believe! I believe! Aw crap! my blood's boiling!"
Arthur: What?
Brother Maynard : my blood's boiling!
Sir Bedemere: What, he's dead?
Brother Maynard: He must've died while posting it.
Arthur: Oh, come on!
Brother Maynard: Well that's what it says.
Arthur: Look, if he was dying he wouldn't bother to type "my blood's boiling!" He'd just say it.
Brother Maynard: Well that's what's posted on Slashdot.
Sir Lancelot: Perhaps he was dictating.
Arthur: Oh, shut up.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
"Those crazy microbes are going to blow up the ocean!"
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
So, If "the Sun is warmer now" Wouldn't The Earth be Getting Warmer Now. Hmmm, so the Greenhouse Effect supposedly caused by the burning of fossil fuels are in equal proportions on the top and bottom of the equation after all.
Off Topic? Perhaps, but the subject is from a quote in the article.
How do bacteria get the energy to break H and O apart? It's a difficult chemical reaction (the atoms are tightly bound). All of that energy has to come from somewhere (the sun?).
I read the internet for the articles.
Your school taught New Math too, huh?
Microbes caused the ice age? That's not half of it... MICROBES ATE MY BALLS!
I would put up a link to a website detailing the evidence for this, but I'm too tired, and come to think of it, I don't have the balls to do it.
D'oh!...
...because the text of a C program has "too many junk characters" and is "lame" by /. standards. Golly.
Hey editors, Google is your friend!
mt
I don't know where you got your 16% figure from, but i've been in the mountains where PPO2 was as low as .12 atmospheres and I was fine. (ok a little winded, but i made sure to take things slow) Since I followed trails there and there was a restaurant, I can only assume that I am not special.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams
Sig
Ugh. What the hell is wrong with people in Ohio?
If you dig shitty singing on top of slightly out of time judas priestish "metal" feel free to visit this horrifying site.
Another +1% of O2 and we'd have a fireball raging, another -1% of O2 and things would not ignite in the free atmosphere.
:)
Did you know that if the oceans were three feet deeper every living thing on earth would drown? And if there were three feet less water the entire planet would be a desert and everything would shrivel and die?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Does anyone know how you get the job of coming up with ways for the earth to be destroyed?
Just wondering.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Scientists have known for a long time that early life on earth was anaerobic and that oxygen was a deadly poison, and that bacteria came along and changed the atmosphere. The real breakthrough in the paper might be the mechanism used by the bacteria to convert the atmosphere, but I haven't read it (and might not understand it if I did).
Sorry, not so. Just because people believed the Earth was flat did not make it so. (Unless we're talking about redefining the word "flat"). The way the universe works is independant of our understanding of the way the universe works. Like Shakespeare said "That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell".
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
So then all fish, seaweed, and crustaceans would drown? Wow.
This is what happens when consumer journalists are allowed to write stories about real science.
Newsflash: nearly all autotrophic life on earth (read: photosynthetic life, commonly known as plants) breaks down water when it creates glucose. Basically what the students have figured out is that cyanobacteria came up with a significant part of the chemical reactions that just about every plant on earth uses now, rather than those reactions evolving further down the chain.
The fact that this occured isn't new. at all. originally it was thought that the O2 that plants make came from the C02 they take in, but it was demonstrated quite some time ago that the plants actually split water and use the oxygens from that for the 02.
conclusion: cnet writers are idiots.
The title of this article puts into my head visions of millions of pac-men chomping down on the ocean.
Damn, I get labelled redundant by posting a similiar idea as someone else within a minute.
Where is all this CO2 supposed to have come from? The planet is covered with ice, remember? All life has been extinguished. What on earth (no pun intended) is going to produce it?
This has got to be in the top 5 dumbest theories evar...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Ra's al Ghul is that you?
(For those who didn't have a misspent childhood reading comic books, Ra's al Ghul is the eco-terrorist supervillain in Batman who seeks "balance" between man and nature, usually involving the extermination of the former)
Just a little guy, y'know?
Yeah, and according to that theory, if people believe that the theory is not right, then it isn't.
Hey "cdn-programmer" I live in Canada too and I love it there as well but you really need to get out a bit more. May I suggest a short holiday to a place called the Caribbean? :-)
I have this vision of a raging fireball in an epic battle with unending floods, courtesy of one percent more oxygen and 3 feet higher oceans. Perhaps I could turn that in to direct to DVD movie. Thanks /.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
I demand that the government employ thousands of (** remove** astronomers) biologists to blanket the (** remove** sky ) ocean watching out for these killer (** remove** aseroids ) microbes. At the moment we can only observe .00001% of the (** remove** sky ) marine biosphere. We need this protection now!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
So all the slashdotters cannot understand sarcasm? Wow.
yhbt. google up Alan Sokal.
...I have bad news. He was seen leaving Doctor Who's TARDIS and it can be therefore assumed that he was reading next thursday's newspaper headlines.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Others have pointed out that this is part of the normal photosynthetic process. And yes, the plants use the oxygen. Sunlight.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Mixed into this equation is the role of water vapour. When the earth is fozen over - there is effetively no water vapour in the atmosphere. If one looks at the ABSOLUTE HUMIDITY CURVES one can see that below zero there is effectively no water vapour in the atmosphere. This is why it is so cold at the top of mountains.
You might be right, but I'm not following here. Absolute humidity is quite low in the Sahara too. You don't think that there is a connection to the fact air, and dry air specifically, has low specific heat, and since there is more air, and less land at the top of the mountains, it is colder? Could wind, carrying away whatever heat there was, play a role? Is it possible that the condensation of water vapour into rain cools the air?
The story started with the prince drowning, and sentence was passed on the brother. But, the authorities did not know there were 6 brothers, so when execution day came, the appropriate brother was sent to be killed.
If execution was to be by baking in an oven, they sent the brother could withstand heat. Beheading? Send the brother with the iron neck.
Eventually, the authorities realized they simply could not kill this man. To resolve the issue, they forgave the brother who could swallow the sea. They ruled the prince's death the prince's own fault, since the initial brother had only swallowed the sea at the prince's order.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Isn't it wierd how one scary theory cancels out another? It's almost like the scientists are having fun trying to outdo each other in their competition for "scary theory" funding, or whatever they call it in the current budget.
SNK couldn't have planned a better battle.
The CFC will warm the Earth at the same rate as the bacteria will cool the earth who will win? Will my backyard become a dessert, a winter playland, or just stay the same?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Mars has lost most of its atmosphere. Mars also seems to have lost most of its water. Mars seems to have had free-running water in the past, with a thicker atmosphere. The thick atmosphere is gone. Most of the water seems to be either frost, or polar icecap.
It is suspected that Mars' atmosphere was kept in equilibrium due to volcanic activity. Once the volcanoes stopped (slowed enough that we don't detect any activity), they couldn't counter the losses anymore. Remember, a lower gravity means that an equivalent amount of atmosphere extends further out into space, due to the pressure. At the fringes, the effects of gravity are significantly lower, and so Mars had a harder job of keeping its atmosphere in the first place. Water vapour gets broken into oxygen and hydrogen, with the hydrogen flying into space and the oxygen reacting with the iron in the soil.
The rate at which we are warming the earth we should welcome this algae to balance the effect. My bet is that we will warm the earth faster than the rate at which this algae can cool it!
I wonder would this ever be as disastrous as Ice-nine in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s novel Cat's Cradle? http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=572596
Won't you think of the children!! they could all be destroyed!!
It seems like a real bad idea to start 'eating' your global water supply as fuel for anything (other than offspring).
Somewhere someone wrote a report that switching to a hydrogen based economy may eventually lead to the loss of free hydrogen to space, as some of it escapes through the upper atmosphere. Their basis was that some hydrogen will not combust and be lost.
Liquid water and carbon are the foundation for life on earth. Mars is nice, but it's really dry and a bit cold.
I look forward to buying a hybrid car that partially runs on compressed air:
http://www.theaircar.com/
And like jurassic park says life 'has a way' of finding work arounds against human safeguards.
Making bacteria that rapidly break down water is a very, very bad idea.
I thought all this warming thing was solely the fault of us people spewing green house gasses.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
So have you. Uberdave left the words "as sweet" off of his Shakespeare quote in an attempt to get a +5 funny.
Hah. This is only one of the explanations for the proposed Snowball -- mind, the Snowball theory itself isn't universally accepted, so when I say this theory is further out, that's saying something. They didn't "determine" this. It's one theorized explanation for the Snowball, a theory which itself involves a great deal of debate. (And only a theory to explain the older, less supported Snowball event, at that. The more recent Snowball event in the Neoproterozoic has better outcrops.)
The Snowball was actually initially a theory about how the Earth *could* freeze solid which nobody believed had actually HAPPENED because they couldn't think of a way for the Earth to get out of the state. Runaway greenhouse feedback -- get ice with a low albedo down to a certain latitude, and the cooling feeds back on itself, becomes unstable, and takes over the earth. They didn't think it had actually happened until (a) someone came up with the carbon dioxide greenhouse to get out of it -- with everything frozen, CO2 would stay in the atmosphere and build up instead of getting redeposited; and (b) they started finding tropical sediments sitting directly on top of ice rafted debris.
(I, for one, welcome our global deep-freeze microbe overlords.)
Science more or less just says what _is_. I.e., what happened or what can happen.
There's nothing inherently "scary" in it. It's just trying to understand how the universe works. The universe as such, isn't either "good" or "evil", "friendly" or "scary". It just "is".
It only starts to be "scary" when sensationalist journalists and wannabe messiahs take that science and repack it as yet another doomsday theory.
"Here's how (we think) something happened a billion years ago" doesn't quite sell newspapers, outside academic circles. Yeah, those cyanobacteria were mean mofos, but how does that affect me nowadays? "If this happens tomorrow, we're all DOOMED!" however seems to. It's suddenly presented as something that is, or can be, your problem.
So guess which of the two will journos spin the story as. Right.
And then come the wannabe messiahs. There are people who actually need a good doomsday theory, and need to imagine that they're fighting to save the world. Preferrably one by which everyone else is a morally bankrupt bastard, if they don't immediately change their lifestyle.
Some people just _need_ that warm fuzzy "I'm fighting to save the world" (and you all are morally bankrupt bastards contributing to the problem) feeling. Gives their lives some meaning, I guess.
So once some journo has spun a story into something scary enough, a group of these _will_ rally around it, proclaim it to be The Ultimate Truth, and put it on a banner for their next crusade.
And where I'm getting at with this long rant, is that it's not scientists that are waving around all these contradicting doomsday theories. (And much less as ultimate truths. Science has _no_ ultimate truth set in stone.) The ones you're seeing making the doomsday fuss are the journos and these wannabe messiah groups, not the scientists who are measuring oxygen concentration in rocks.
And yes, you have correctly noted that fashionable doomsday theories do conveniently omit any factors which might even things out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm fully confident in mankind's ability to produce enough greenhouse gases to avoid a snowball Earth :)
Maybe we should lift the ban on cfcs
What kind of a crock of bull is this? The breakdown of H2O into H2 and O2 is an ENDOTHERMIC reaction. You can't extract energy from it to fuel life or anything else, it TAKES energy to break it down.
magnesium will burn under water
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
But just in case, is it possible that Bush and the Neo-cons are on the right track promoting global warming? They would deny this of course but who would be naive enough to assume there was any need to align press releases with actual objectives? Perhaps they are just trying to avoid a national panic?
A thought provoking article...
Ahhh...that felt good.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"When/If the awful end comes, dont you think that if anyone will have seen it coming, it will be "an alarmist"?"
When/if the awful end comes, I expect a scientist to see it coming.
For starters, that's where the alarmist save-the-world crowd get (and then pervert) their ideas from. First comes the scientist who measures something, and only _then_ some doomsday prophet takes that and perverts it into a doomsday scare story to save the world from.
E.g., it wasn't the eco-scare folks who measured the 1 degree celsius rise in a whole century (which started the global warming madness), it was first measured and plotted by some meteorologsists. The eco-scare gang only then came and took over the idea.
So I'll just cut the middleman (especially the kind of middleman who doesn't even understand it, but is in it just to feel important by "saving the world") and get my facts directly from the scientists.
Same with a clock, really. If I think it's broken, I won't take my time from it at all. Not to see which time it is, not to see the time it isn't. I'll NTP to a reference atomic clock instead.
When/if the time comes, chances are about 11 out of 12, or about 92%, that the broken clock won't just show the wrong time, but the wrong hour altogether. Likewise when/if the awful end comes, probably the doomsday prophets will be in dada land, whining about some completely other topic.
E.g., if the awful end comes as a hydrogen-producing bacteria run amok and massive glaciation, the currently fashionable scare-story would be that sex causes cholesterol and everyone should stop doing it. Or that the sudden drop in temperature is really still global warming. Or whatever unrelated.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The snowball earth happened 630 million years ago. Not 4.5 bya.
That's a slightly shorter time scale than the age of the earth.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
We've got reports from last year saying the Sun has been brighter recently and we've got higher sunspot activity than we've seen in 1,000 years. linky
My, somewhat ironic, point was that everyone has been so busy pointing fingers at us humans that we forget that we're not the only ones in control of the climate.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I'm sorry, but what is a natural density for humans?
Actually, depending on fat content, it is around that of water. A little less after death, due to gasses generated in decomposition.
Humans, SG ~ 1
Humans have yet to demonstrate the ability to screw up this planet enough that for life to survive it would have to CHANGE THE GAS IT LIVES ON! in order to continue.
It's been ages since I've studied any biology / geology, but if I recall correctly, there was another major climate change about the time of the spread of grasses across the surface. They would change the composition of the atmosphere over time as well as change how heat is absorbed or retained.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
That is not true whatsoever... broadly ignorant statements about all scientists and research grants
Actually, my statements are not made based on a layman's ignorance, or even based on a generalized theoretical concept of how grant funding works. It's based on my professional experiences as a scientist reviewing grant proposals and making recommendations on which proposals to fund, as well as my experiences writing and submitting research grants.
As part of the review process, the panel of scientists responsible for evaluating the proposal takes into consideration the significance of the problem being investigated. How is significance defined? Typically, it's based on the professional judgement of the scientists on the review panel as to what constitutes an important problem. However, it is also based on mandates and directives from the funding agency. If someone highly placed (funding agency director, congressman, etc.) has been swayed by alarmist press surrounding the Iceball Earth phenomenon, and has, as a result, decided that we need to know more about it, then there will be a pot of money set aside just for that topic. These earmarked research funds ensure that this topic will get at least a certain non-zero level of funds, a guarantee that other topics don't have.
Political pressure is one of the forces which drives research money in one direction or another. That's just a fact of science. The more urgent and important your research is percieved to be, the greater liklihood it will be funded. The more trivial and irrelevant your research is percieved to be, the less likely it will be funded.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Sigh we already have these algae, their called blue algae.
We have things that eat them now, so they aren't a problem.
When Oxygen was a poison to most creatures THEN it was a problem now it's not.
Don't bunch your panties.
I think the people making the most noise right now are the ones claiming that by not signing Kyoto we've doomed the planet. Of course, they do this to lay tha blame at the feet of the current President rather than acknowledge that Kyoto had been voted dead long before the current President took office.
There are studies saying that Total Solar Irradiance varies by as much as 0.2% per day (due to level and location of sunspots). This represents a huge amount of energy but they aren't sure if it affects weather. The atmosphere actually expands during Solar Maximums.
I just really don't see how ANY model can hope to gather all of these items together to come up with viable trends and solutions to global climate change.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.