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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."
It would have given me a nice excuse the next time my wife noticed I had gained weight. "It's not the junk food, honey. The earth is gaining mass and causing me to weigh more!!!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
And neither match a good blaster by your side.
Since when does "added to the system" mean created or destroyed? The earth is not the entire universe. Energy gets added to us from the sun, for example.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
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According to E=mc^2, one gram of matter is equivalent to 10^13 J of energy (according to Wolfram|Alpha).
energy is added to the system
i thought energy can not be created or detroyed
Moved, not created or destroyed.
Come out of your mom's basement, look up at that bright yellow object in the sky.
If there is any global warming, that's where its coming from.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Math people, try it sometime. It works a lot better than your hokey religion.
Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerous ways, Lord jmorris42. Your sad devotion to that ancient math has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you enough clairvoyance to find the rebels' hidden fortress...
Some models do have some kind of nuclear-reactor thing going on at the very center, but it's indeed not right to present it as some kind of fact, when it's greatly disputed what might be there (and our evidence is very circumstantial). As far as I can trace it, the proposal for a "nuclear georeactor" in a sub-core of the inner core is due to J.M. Herndon, who proposed it in 1996, and has since developed the idea in various other papers. I don't think it's anywhere near consensus, though.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So now burning (hint, just a chemical action) some dead dinosaur is releasing the energy equivilent of 160 TONNES?
I'm pretty sure he means that if the surface temperature increases by 1 degree C, then that corresponds to a higher amount of energy in the planet. it has nothing to do with burning fuel or anything else.
And here some people are worried about running out of uranium.
We'll never use up a 5-mile diameter sphere of uranium!
The problem is getting to it.
I mean if you believe "science" then it's surrounded by molten rock.
And if you believe the book journey to the center of the earth, then its surrounded by dinosaurs.
Both I understand are fatal to humans.
Ah, so the earth isn't retaining an increasing amount of heat? What evidence do you base this assertion on?
Spread throughout the whole of the Earth, combined with how much we're incapable of utilizing, that totally doesn't surprise me. Consider how much energy from the Sun hits the Earth every year that all just goes to waste, let alone what is reflected or shines off in other directions.
I think only a reactionary, kneejerk idiot would make this kind of ridiculously wrong statement.
It'd help your argument if you had something more than a tenuous grasp on thermodynamics and the processes involved with the retention of heat. Also, do consider that when working with the masses of planets and the energy output of stars, 160 tons is so easy to come across that, yes, it is highly like that this is in fact the case. Funny, though, how you get so violently worked up over it.
Depends which globe you are talking about. If you're not talking about Earth- you're off topic.
If you're talking about Earth and look at overall trend analysis graphs covering the last 100 years- the last 15 years fit in the scale correctly. Also 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred during the past 15 years.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Well, warming may not make things more massive according to classical physics, but in the Theory of Relativity, all energy counts as mass. E=mc^2, it goes both ways. Warm objects are very, very slightly heavier than otherwise identical cold objects. So if our atmosphere traps the heat of the sun, that will result in a slight increase in mass. Although I doubt even a few degrees of warming will make a 160 ton difference. c^2 is a pretty big factor.
Or just drill parallel pipes, pump cold water down one, get hot water up the other. No danger of a catastrophic meltdown, because, like, that's already happened.
Also has the beneficial side-effect of (allegedly) creating earthquakes, how cool is that?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No wonder my TV is always covered. Time for a bubble dome to keep it all out.
So now burning (hint, just a chemical action) some dead dinosaur is releasing the energy equivilent of 160 TONNES? Eh?
No. Burning is mass-neutral. Not only is it chemical, as you point out, but the energy released during burning is still in Earth, so by mass-energy-conservation, the total mass of the Earth is unchanged.
It's the increasing average temperature of the Earth that causes the increase in mass. That temperature increase is not energy released from burning fuel, but rather additional energy captured from solar radiation (as a result of increased atmospheric CO2). So ultimately all the additional mass is coming from solar radiation.
160 tons of mass ~= 10^22 J
Solar irradiance over the surface of the Earth ~= 10^17 W ~= 10^24 J/yr
Math people, try it sometime.
I see that you didn't take your own advice. I see no math in your post whatsoever, despite the fact that 1 kg of mass in energy is easy to compute and the total energy used by civilization has been estimated before.
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.
See, here math would have been useful.
But Americans are attempting to even things out.
I think the point the author is making isn't about the energy of burning fossil fuels, it's about the heat trapping that results. Normally the Earth is at ~100% energy balance with respect to solar radiation: a lot comes in (174 petawatts), and just about all of it gets radiated back out, continuously. But by trapping extra energy here on Earth in the form of heat, AGW gradually increases the Earth's total energy. E=mc^2 is not just for nuclear reactions: any system that gains or loses energy effectively gains or loses an equivalent mass. By how much? This guy says it's the energy equivalent of 160 tons of mass 160 tons, when converted to energy, is 1.44*10^22 Joules: a whole bigass boatload of energy. But, it is actually rather small (1/400th) compared to the total energy received by Earth from the sun in one year. So it doesn't take but a tiny percentage change the energy balance, accumulated over many decades, to get 160 tons of mass.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you? Please try, if you can, to explain what was wrong with the statement.
To quote a later AC post that seems to also be from you: "You can't create mass, it's a basic concept in science."
Believe it or not, there's more to science than what you learned in grade school. If the composition of the Earth's atmosphere changes in such a way that it traps more energy from the sun, that will cause an increase in mass.
So you count the 16 tonnes a year from a nuclear reaction that may or may not be there, but you ignore the effects of space rockets, some of which have payloads in the hundreds of metric tonnes? (the Saturn V can carry 45 tonnes to a Lunar Injection orbit and over twice that to LEO.) Huh, interesting.
Also, what is this about the weight of the Costa Concordia? I want to know how many Libraries of Congress that is per year, damnit.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Ok, so you're threadshitting via ignorance. Good job.
Popping that number into Wolfram|Alpha, getting the conversion to Joules and converting that to grams yields 8.912×10^9 grams.
Honestly, though, the state that global warming is adding 160 tons of mass to Earth is just BS. You could say that if we were talking about geological time periods, but global warming (if it exists) definitely doesn't exist for geological time periods. Ice ages last long enough to get noticed by the planet's interior, warming periods do not.
It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet. And even the worst case runaway global warming projections do not predict one degree per year. Long before the entire planet is heated by rising surface temperatures, the next ice age will hit us.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
One thing that most posters overlooked was the statement that the Earth's GeoReactor may be shutting down (in anywhere from 100 years to 1 billion years). The theory states that when this happens the earth will lose its magnetic field and then its atmosphere. Scary!
This estimate would be vaguely correct if you used the Earth's surface area. However, the Earth's cross-sectional area is area of the 2D disc that is formed by a meridian. The area of solar radiation it absorbs is exactly its cross-sectional area. (What part of the surface that happens to be changes as time passes and a unit of sunlight is spread over a larger surface around the edges, but the total area is constant and is simply the cross-sectional area.)
the mainstream view is that the iron-nickel core of the earth is of the same source and composition of iron-nickel asteroids, which have little or no uranium.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
-- M.C. Hawking, "Entropy"
The enemies of Democracy are
I have no idea what you are talking about. Are you responding to someone, or just ranting into the ether?
Dude, I got his blaster comment. Best laugh I've had all day!
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet.
So what? If the entire damn planet, core and everything, heated up by 1 degree the result would be a damn lot more than 160 tons of extra mass-energy!
The calculation is based simply on the estimated amount of excess solar energy retained. It has nothing to do with whether or not the energy spreads through the earth. The energy is already here, increasing the earth's mass.
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Solar energy, however, does increase Earth's mass via energy, and a byproduct of that energy is global warming
That's what man-made global warming is. (The term "anthropogenic" is better here to imply that it's man-caused and not man-made.) We do things that increase the fraction of the heat from solar radiation that remains on Earth*. The Sun then causes Earth's temperature to increase.
* Specifically, since Earth is more or less in a vacuum, its entire thermodynamic exchange consists of radiation: (a) the Sun irradiating the Earth, adding energy and (b) Earth radiating out into space. Factor (a) is basically a constant (solar irradiation * Earth cross-sectional area) times some things that are variable: like reflectivity. Factor (b) is roughly black-body radiation: Stefan-Boltzmann constant * emissivity * T^4, where emissivity is the thing that is annoyingly complicated. The average temperature of the Earth is the value of T such that (a) = (b); that is, the Earth is in thermal equilibrium.
Wait - the expected global warming is on the order of 1 degree per century, not per year - so they are really off by 3 orders of magnitude. They aren't talking about warming the atmosphere. They are calculating the warming of the entire planet, including the core. Very silly - way before a 1 degree change has propagated even a tenth of the way in we will be back in the more usual ice age climate.
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There's no evidence of a georeactor in the Earth's core. We know this by measuring the abundance of geoneutrinos - neutrinos generated by radioactive decay and nuclear fission. The KamLAND, Japan and Borexino, Italy discovered a ~50% deficit in geoneutrinos i.e. 22 of 44 TerraWatts of heat comes from radioactive decay. The rest is primordial, left over from the Earth's cataclysmic formation. If there was a georeactor there would have been an anomalous abundance in geoneutrinos (KamLAND detected fission neutrinos from nearby Japanese nuclear reactors).
The hypothesis of a georeactor, powered by a 16km diameter sphere of Uranium, was put forward by maverick scientist J. Marvin Herndon. He also believes the Earth is expanding and he rejects plate tectonics. Despite that, mainstream science did not ignore him but enthusiastically tested this georeactor theory.
Gando, A. et al., 2011. Partial radiogenic heat model for Earth revealed by geoneutrino measurements. Nature Geoscience 4(9), 647-651.
Do the calculation yourself (or just read below) - it is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude!
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The calculations are below in the thread. It is off by 3 orders of magnitude if you look at only atmospheric heating.
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Energy is mass. E=mc^2 gives us the conversion factor between energy units (e.g. joules) and mass units (e.g. grams). If an object heats up, it has more energy, and thus more mass. If you want to find out how much more massive, you will need to do some math. You can see some in the posts above that seem to show that there is enough solar energy falling on the Earth each year that if the atmosphere is trapping just slightly more than it is letting be emitted into space, the mass of the Earth will increase by many tons per year.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Thanks, I was going to go through those same calculations, because I couldn't believe the numbers. In fact, I double checked your numbers (because I still had trouble believing) and came up with the same thing.
It's shocking to me that the energy accumulated by Earth from solar radiation is measurable in tonnes! Remember that the devastation from a nuke comes from a fraction of 1% of the mass of a relatively tiny piece of uranium.
To add a little more math, the atmosphere weighs roughly 5*10^21 grams. The specific heat of air is about 1 joule per gram-kelvin, so the solar radiance of the earth should raise the temperature 200 degrees centigrade each year if none was reflected or absorbed into the ground/water!
Even if you only assume the mass that this report claims is absorbed, it would add 2 degrees centigrade each year. Obviously some is absorbed into the ground, but either way it's clearly unsustainable. At some temperature, the Earth must radiate more than it is absorbing, otherwise we would burn up.
It seems clear to me that the temperature of the earth is going to be vary wildly depending on albedo/reemission, which life on earth affects by varying the composition of the atmosphere and surface reflection. This must be an influence on evolution - over the long run, organisms that tend to pull the temperature up when it gets too low and down when it gets too high would tend to succeed. By which I mean organisms that don't fit this profile would tend to wipe out virtually all life on earth, including themselves.
Maybe this is the cause of some of the extinction events in the fossil layers? It seems unbelievable that this hasn't happened before - some microscopic organism produces methane or CO2 in bulk and is very successful, then succeeds so well it fucks up the ecosystem for everybody.
It also looks like this is an existential test for humanity - maybe we can be the first multicellular organism to influence the temperature feedback loop enough to wipe ourselves out. Although I think it's more likely we'll just screw things up so badly lots of us die, until we lose the ability to influence the feedback loop enough to break it or we finally get the sense that our actions matter globally.
Huh?
The knowledge and certainty level about nuclear georeactors is quite low (understatement), and it is a minority opinion that it exists. If it does we certainly don't know enough about its prehistory either and what the consequences to climate would have been, so the climatological record isn't remotely conclusive on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget#Incoming_energy
Incoming solar radiation is 173 petawatts, 44 to 47 terawatts from "stored heat and radioactive decay" (probably not from fission), which is 0.025%.
So a variation of 4 terawatts is about 0.002% of solar insolation. Now the climate can be sensitive but I doubt it's that sensitive. It probably wouldn't be possible to pick up a fluctuation in a 4 terawatt core georeactor in climate data.
The core georeactor should be actually reasonably easy to detect if you can analyze neutrino scattering data and get initial angle and energy distribution of the incoming particles. That fact that I haven't heard of such a signal (the neutrino experimentalists would have found an unusual pesky background that they couldn't get rid of when trying to measure solar neutrinos) leads me to believe far more directly and without reference to climate that it's unlikely there's any signifcant core georeactor. Maybe it's possible it was just missed, and was in the data.
Atmospheric physics and dynamics is much, much better understood since we've had experiments and theory for 50 years or so.
Do the math. It doesn't work.
Remember, we're not talking total energy; just the delta in a year. If that is 0.1 degrees per year, that's what would need to fed into the energy/mass equation. Other comments in this thread show how the entire input of the sun on the earth in a year come out to 80 tons. I doubt the increase in heat year over year even makes one ton.
I guess he wanted to add mass to the thread.
It takes over 4 Joules of energy to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Your 22,964.4 Joule figure would be sufficient raise the temperature of 5.5 liters of water by 1 degree C.
The earth's mass is slightly larger than 5.5 liters of water and thus requires slightly more energy to raise its temperature by one degree.
Try again
One kilogram of mass converted directly to energy would last about 40 minutes.
(Picks up a bag of sugar, eyes it thoughtfully)
40 minutes, eh? That's still pretty cool...
So how does that translate to 160 tonnes a year? The total mass of earth is estimated as 5.9721986×10^24 kg or 5.9721986×10^21 tonnes. To raise that mass by 1 C requires 22,964.44 J of energy.
Ahem... 22,964.44 Joules of energy will not heat very much stuff up by 1 degree Celsius. That's less than the metabolic energy of 1 gram of fat. You missed something pretty important in your numbers.
Regardless, this was not talking about raising the average temperature of the entire mass of the Earth, but an increat in the "surface temperature" of the earth. There's a pretty big difference. However....
And it takes about 100 years to raise the temperature of earth by 1 C. So I'd say their math is way off.
I imagine it would take a pretty long time to raise the temperature of the entire mass of the earth by 1 degree Celsius. Not a "don't blink, or you'll miss it" timeframe like 100 years.
To raise that mass by 1 C requires 22,964.44 J of energy.
Even assuming you meant ~23,000 kilojoules (as your energy figure suggests), this is still off by many orders of magnitude. One kilogram of water takes 4.184 kJ, so ~23 MJ will raise ~5500 liters of water by 1 C. Per Wikipedia, the ocean is estimated at 1.3 * 10^21 liters. Raising that by 1 C takes 5.44 * 10^24 joules, which is equivalent to ~60,500 metric tons. Based on your assumption of 1 C per 100 years, that's 60.5 tons per year for the ocean alone, or 37% of the 160 tons given in the summary. Add in the rock and the atmosphere (including water vapor) and you've probably got a wild overestimate.
Now will the entire volume of the planet get a 1 C increase? I doubt it, but I'm not an earth scientist. I suspect it would mostly be the atmosphere, part of the ocean, and part of the dirt and rock. But the estimate given is definitely not 16 orders of magnitude off.
Visit the
Dude, your math is WAY off. How'd you go from mass to required energy without determining the specific heat of the earth?
Here, let me calculate the energy required to heat just the iron content of the earth (34.6% by mass) by 1 C: 9.278* 10^26 J, which is equivalent to 1.037 & 10^7 metric tonnes.
You are off by a LOT of decimal places. A mere 23kJ should have immediately tipped you off as not passing the smell test. That's less than 1/1000th of the energy released by burning 1 liter of gasoline!
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Who mods this stuff interesting when the calculation is so many orders of magnitude off? Seriously, 22 kJ to raise the earth 1 C? It's bad enough someone (Curunir_wolf) actually wrote the comment in the first place.
Congratulations! You've just posted the most idiotic slashdot comment of 2012.
We've still got a little less than 11 months to go, don't be giving that award out just yet.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Wrong. Simply raising the the temperature of an object does not raise the mass. What are you guys smoking?
We're smoking Einstein's old pajama pants. Also, we're correct and you aren't. Higher temperature means more energy in a system. More energy means more mass. Yeah, it's a little weird. It's also an inevitable consequence of the constant speed of light, and the conservation of momentum and energy. Starting with those three assumptions you can prove that E=mc^2.
The energy is stored in the state of the matter, not in its mass.
So, nature is more complex than we credit it for and, as a result of that, we should dumb down our understanding of modern physics to ignore mass-energy equivalence and binding force. Got it.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
-- I am a crackpot
So you are, so you are.
Every end has half a stick.
Hey look another idiot like the OP who thinks "Do the math!" means use vague qualitative statements!
Guess what, "ginormous" and "miniscule" have different meanings when talking about the scale of the earth, and the energy received by the sun. The sun dumps thousands of metric tonnes worth of energy on the earth every year. The earth masses at around 10^24 kg. 160 tonnes is in fact minuscule. It can't realistically be accounted for just by atmospheric heating, but that's not the same thing as saying it's completely unrealistic.
Idiot.
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Adding energy increases mass, you normally dont notice it because c^2 is pretty big.
[...] 23kJ[...] That's less than 1/1000th of the energy released by burning 1 liter of gasoline!
And that's why cars are causing global warming! duh.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Yeah it sucks how the earth warms 1000 degrees every time I drive to work. Sorry for cooking everyone! :)
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The energy we think of as heat is actually the kinetic energy of the motion of atoms. So the parts of the copper that are moving faster would have more of the energy than those that are moving slower.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
To put it crudely the mass is "in" the energy, so wherever the energy is is where the mass is. In the case of kinetic energy it's simply a property of the moving object (and varies depending on frame of reference!) In the case of potential energy it manifests itself as the field between the objects which are interacting with each other. For instance two protons close together have more mass than two protons far away from each other -- the additional mass-energy resides in the EM field between the protons. Or to be quantum about it, the energy is manifest in the form of virtual photons which constitute the interaction between the protons.
I saw Herndon give a seminar on this topic a few years ago. It is a plausible theory, but not an established fact, and not accepted by most in the field. As I recall, we don't understand the earth's core well enough to know if enough uranium could have collected at the center for a reactor to happen. One way of testing the idea is to look at the flux of anti-neutrinos coming from the earth. If the number is greater than can be explained by beta decay of the thorium-chain elements, it would point toward a geo-reactor. I seem to recall that some proposed neutrino detectors have a chance of measuring this. They have to be able to discriminate against the large flux of neutrinos coming from the sun. An interesting part of the theory is that the geo-reactor proposed by Herndon will run out of fuel relatively soon, so if it exists the earth will lose and important source of internal heat and begin cooling much sooner than if all the heat comes from radioactive decay.
My SIG is a P226
Indeed, it would take an unbelievably long time to raise the temperature of the ENTIRE planet by one degree Celsius, but with two google searches and a couple of simple equations you can calculate the raising the temperature of the 5.97*10^24 kilogram ball of iron and nickel we call Earth by one degree Celsius would increase the Earth's mass by about 33 million tons, not a mere 160.
Even without reading the article, I think it is safe to say the 160 ton per year figure is derived from the heating of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans, which are getting measurably warmer and will continue to do so no matter how loudly you shout 'la-la-la can't hear you' while sticking your fingers in your ears.
Ever look at the periodic table of elements in detail? Notice how hydrogen is not exactly one, helium is not exactly 4, nitrogen is not exactly 12, etc.? Well partly that's because of different isotopes (carbon 12, carbon 13, carbon 14, etc), but even if you had a pure isotope, it wouldn't come out exactly. That's because part of the mass of an atom is tied up in the binding energy in the nucleus, and the binding energy between the electrons and the nucleus.
If you take hydrogen and oxygen and react them together, it will give off heat, and the resulting water will have a mass reduced by the amount of heat given off. I think I've even read that most of the mass of protons and neutrons is tied up in the binding energy of the quarks, and that the quarks by themselves don't weight that much.
Like another reply said, the only reason you don't notice this effect is because a even a few hundred degrees temperature change is so minuscule compared to c^2.
The most baseless claim in the summary is that there is a 5 mile wide sphere of Uranium acting as a nuclear reactor at the centre of the Earth.
There is no evidence for this, it's just wild speculation.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.