Is the Earth Gaining Or Losing Mass?

Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC recently asked physicist and Cambridge University professor Dave Ansell to draw up a balance sheet of the mass that's coming in to the earth, and the mass going out to find out if the earth is gaining or losing mass. By far the biggest contributor to the world's mass is the 40,000 tonnes of dust that is falling from space to Earth every year. 'The Earth is acting like a giant vacuum cleaner powered by gravity in space, pulling in particles of dust,' says Dr. Chris Smith. Another factor increasing the earth's mass is global warming which adds about 160 tonnes a year because as the temperature of the Earth goes up, energy is added to the system, so the mass must go up. On the minus side, at the very center of the Earth, within the inner core, there exists a sphere of uranium five mile in diameter which acts as a natural nuclear reactor so these nuclear reactions cause a loss of mass of about 16 tonnes per year." (Read more, below.) Pickens continues: "What about launching rockets and satellites into space, like Phobos-Grunt? Smith discounts this as the mass is negligible and most of it will fall back down to Earth again anyway. But by far the biggest factor in earth's weight loss are the 95,000 tonnes of hydrogen that escape from the atmosphere every year. 'The other very light gas this is happening to is helium and there is much less of that around, so it's about 1,600 tonnes a year of helium that we lose.' Taking all the factors into account, Smith reckons the Earth is getting about 50,000 tonnes lighter a year, which is just less than half the gross weight of the Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise liner that recently ran aground."

Comments

Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me.

[jmorris42]

Can we put out a memo that EVERY SINGLE science story doesn't need a green religious hook in it? Please? You guys are worse than the most rabid Pentecostal.

I promise you that if you look at the error bars on the 40,000 in and 95,000 numbers the 160 atributed to global warming is lost in the noise. And that is IF you accept that number in the first place which is pretty bogus sounding. Anyone remember just how much energy is in mass anymore? How one kilogram of mass directly converted to energy is so much fricking energy that it would probably power all of civilization for a year or more? So now burning (hint, just a chemical action) some dead dinosaur is releasing the energy equivilent of 160 TONNES? Eh? The mass of the burned material drops by the amount of the released energy and either escapes to space or ends up captured as mass somewhere on Earth. IF one assumes AGW the mass of heating the crust and atmosphere of the earth a tiny fraction of a degree per year isn't going to give tons either. Math people, try it sometime. It works a lot better than your hokey religion.

Re:Good grief. Religious zealots really annoy me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, labeling "global warming" as a contributor to mass is deceiving, "man-made global warming" wouldn't increase earth's mass at all. Combustion in a closed environment cannot increase or decrease mass.

Solar energy, however, does increase Earth's mass via energy, and a byproduct of that energy is global warming (as opposed to having Pluto-like global freezing)

MOD PARENT UP: religious zealots

[davek]

OP is correct. Going into an experiment with a preconceived bias isn't science, it's politics:

as the temperature of the Earth goes up, energy is added to the system, so the mass must go up.

But from TFA:

So taking into account the gains and the losses, Dr Smith reckons the Earth is getting about 50,000 tonnes lighter a year.

So AGW isn't happening, then?