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Hot Water, Hot Earth
Calopteryx notes a New Scientist article on the discovery of "supercritical" water emerging from a vent in the Atlantic Ocean at 407 deg. C (765 deg. F). One of its discoverers actually said, "It's water, but not as we know it"; it's the hottest water ever found on earth. The cause seems to be a huge bubble of magma beneath the ocean floor, 3 km below the sea surface. Meanwhile Nymz shares a journal entry on a hot spot on land: a 2-acre patch in Ventura county, in California, that has heated up to 433 deg. C (812 deg. F). Here geologists blame buried hydrocarbons burning as they get access to air through cracks in the ground. That high temperature was measured a foot below the ground surface.
Burning hydrocarbons?! Sounds like a good place to put a combo drill/refinery/gas station!
ON DELETE CASCADE
I think I saw a special about black smokers on TV, I believe they were discovered in 1977 and I remember watching an interview of miniature sub (Alvin) pilot explaining that his temperature sensor melted when they came upon one of them and he decided to get a reading. If I recall the anecdote correctly, they were slowly drifting toward it as his friend explained to him that the hull of their craft was made of the same metal as the thermometer. He then very carefully began to operate the propellers in reverse.
I think it was even back then that speculation began of life starting around this geothermal energy. That these minerals only populated the sea and made for nutrient rich sea water in which life could propagate.
The only news here is that the 400 ÂC has been passed on record. I think everyone knew these could get insanely hot.
My work here is dung.
Buy an electric car TODAY people! That petrol is causing the ocean to heat up... Wait, what? Magma? Really? Wasn't that around before we invented cars?
Hang on folks, I'll have to get back to you...
Once you put water under enough pressure (think 4000 PSI), you can pump almost an infite amount of heat into it without it undergoing a phase change. Useful for all sorts things, like breaking down any organic compound into constituant atoms. So the water in the story isn't the hottest on earth, only the hottest naturally occuring.
Seriously, though, wouldn't the water just convert to steam at that point, even if it WAS under that much water?
The term "supercritical" doesn't just make a nice-sounding buzzword to toss into the article.
It literally means that you can make no meaningful distinction between the liquid and gaseous phases of the water at that pressure and temperature - You have something between the two phases with no phase-change energy transition separating them.
As an aside, humans use supercritical water all the time, in power plants. This only counts as interesting because we've never seen it occur naturally before (most likely because we don't tend to hang out a lot in places at pressures above 22MPa).
It sounds like hot fire is already present, throw in "hot heart" and you've got yourself a hot captain planet!
Actually there is a reason: it's "supercritical".
For it to turn to steam would require a phase change between it and the surrounding water, and a supercritical fluid by definition has no distinct phase change between the liquid and gasous phases.
You'd think that if the pressure would be high enough, a liquid would stay a liquid at any arbitrary temperature, but that's not what happens. If you have a vessel strong enough to withstand the increasing pressure, and you heat a liquid within it, that has a gasous phase above it, you first see boiling. Then, as the pressure in the gas phase rises, the boiling stops. But, if you keep heating it, an interesting thing happens: the line between liquid and gas phase disappears, and the fluid only has one phase. It is supercritical.
In this case, boiling never starts because the pressure is high to begin with.
Now, the supercritical water is much less dense than seawater (or plain water, for that matter), so it does rise, and if it cools slower than the pressure drops as it rises, yes, it might start to boil.
In Liberty, Rene
This isn't the town that had to be condemned because the coal underground was ignited?
That would be Centralia, Pennsylvania