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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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-- I am a crackpot
So you are, so you are.
Every end has half a stick.
Adding energy increases mass, you normally dont notice it because c^2 is pretty big.
Yeah it sucks how the earth warms 1000 degrees every time I drive to work. Sorry for cooking everyone! :)
The enemies of Democracy are
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.