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Earth's Core Far Hotter Than Thought
hessian writes "New measurements suggest the Earth's inner core is far hotter than prior experiments suggested, putting it at 6,000C — as hot as the Sun's surface. The solid iron core is actually crystalline, surrounded by liquid. But the temperature at which that crystal can form had been a subject of long-running debate. Experiments outlined in Science used X-rays to probe tiny samples of iron at extraordinary pressures to examine how the iron crystals form and melt."
Global warming has reached the core!
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Does this mean we can go Super-Nova?
Quick, someone tell Aaron Eckhart so he can go back to The Core 2: Crystalline Boogaloo.
Thank goodness I saw this article. I have been planning my trip to the Inner Core, but my unobtanium suit is only rated for 5500C
I can just see the creationists saying "we always knew hell was down there"!
Don't-cha wish your core was hot like mine? Don't-cha wish your core was hot like mine? Don't-cha?
Thought thinks itself.
I may have misread, but I think this article is saying that 20% hotter is "far" hotter. Not the adjective I would use for 20%.
My planned Journey to the Centre of the Earth has to be put on hold, dammit!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
this new model suggests 6000 +/- 500 degrees C, the old model was 6000 +/- 1000 degrees to some sources, but up to 9000 degrees by others
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,262762,00.html
the point is 6000 degrees C has long, long been in the possible range, and the earth's core may well be much hotter
Another year goes by and we see another GUESS at how hot the earth's core is......or how old the earth is. Can we stop funding people who guess at things that don't really matter?
first organization obligated to care bot7oms buut. Wipe a GAY NIGGER
Big deal. That's like the difference between December and July in the Midwest.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The new estimate is "plus or minus 500C". Sounds like they had a coarse number (guessing plus or minus one or two thousand) and now they have a slightly more accurate number. Certainly no need for sensationalistic headlines.
I come here for the love
5C to 6C is less than a 1% increase in temperature.
(Celsius isn't a ratio scale where 0 of the quantity measured is 0 on the scale; Kelvin is -- 5C to 6C is 278K to 279K; at the range of 5000C to 6000C, the difference between C and K is small and doesn't effect ratios much, but at 5-6C that's not true.)
The earth's core is iron. The lake of fire is sulfur, an element formerly called brimstone. There's a difference.
The Earth is warming, right to the core! MY GOD we have to do something about it!
Because we all know you can throw a couple of nukes down their to solve our problems.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Great balls of fire.
Seriously, though. Science is awesome.
I mean People Magazine crowned her "World's Most Beautiful Woman", so she is far hotter than many people thought.
Proverbs 21:19
Then it's going to leave behind an awesome disco ball? God is groovy.
We've not even been to the deepest depths of the ocean, and they still are on what we call the surface of this planet. For all we know Earth is dirt all the way down with hella pressure, causing heat. We could determine the possible heat at depths, only by taking temperature samples at varying depths, and then assuming the temps continue that trend to the core. But how the hell would we ever be able to just say "The center of the planet is make of ___" without having any sort of science to back that up? People will tell you, (use your best redneck voice) "We gots a magnetic field round us, so it's gotta be some'n wiff the core...", but what is the scientific process that presented us with that idea?
Think about it. The Core is about hot as the sun, that is enough for a sustained fusion reaction, we need to find a way of pumping hydrogen to the core and have them fuse to become helium, creating a nearly unlimited power source. This unlimited power will allow us to focus more on mental activities and less on physical ones allowing our brains to expand and our bodies to become smaller. Being that we don't need to go out getting our hair cut would be a massive chore so we naturally select people who are naturally bald. We are indoors most of the time so our skin gets very pail. And the extra helium in the atmosphere will raise up our voices by a few octaves.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As a kid I used to hear that the earth was 4,000,000,000 years old - "based on the heat of the earth's core." I am no physicist, so, what impact does this have on the estimated age of the earth?
How about an anthropic "hotness" unit on a scale from the sea level freezing point of the most abundant compound in the human body (oxidane, freezes at 0 C, triple point a tiny fraction of a kelvin higher) to the normal operating temperature of the human body (37 C)?
The core is supposed to have formed after the earth per se. The current model used for the formation of our solar system is much more speculative than some pseudoscientist slashdot posters picking on the superstitious would have you believe.
this phrase was used by geologist wearing beer goggles...
WTF are the specs for "thought"? It seems everything is bigger, smaller, faster, slower, and now hotter than thought.
If they're going to have a universal reference like "thought", they should post the specs!
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
One.
But the light bulb has to want to change.
No brain, no pain.
So basically, you heat up a small sample and put it under extreme pressures, and measure the electrical conductivity until it resembles the earth. Of course, there's a massive temperature gradient from the lab-temperature edge of the sample and the superhot center. And maybe the sample's gonna be at different temperatures as well, developing grain boundaries in the sample, and maybe those grain boundaries will serve as circuits around the superhot center of the sample.
I'm no expert on these things, but even I know that Diamond-Anvil Cells are terrible tech, and have been terrible tech for the last quarter-century. Yeah, they're inherently flawed, but an unskilled operator can further come up with "surprising" results.
Amusing aside: this is a French study. The synthetic diamonds in DACs eventually break, so last time I checked (over a decade ago -- again, I'm no expert), in the French system they are classified as office supplies instead of lab equipment. So the study authors didn't have many shots to get to the test conditions right either.
I don't know - I'm just putting it out there and it's probably already been thought of, so maybe there are some geologists out there that can clue me in.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
None.
Around half of the Earth's internal energy is from radiogenic sources (potassium, uranium and thorium decaying in the interior) and about half is the heat of accretion (landing comets and asteroids on the surface supplies a lot of energy). A relatively small (20%) change in estimated internal temperature doesn't affect the estimate of the age of the Earth, because the age of the Earth is not estimated from it's temperature.
In the 1860s, estimates of the age of the Earth were made based on ideas about it's internal temperature. But these did not include the effect of radioactive decay, which wasn't discovered until the late 1890s, and wasn't well understood until the 1930s. Inevitably they were wildly wrong - like estimating how long your savings will last without including your wife's clothes buying in the calculation.
By that time (the 1930s), radiogenic dating by comparison of parent-daughter radioisotope sets was yielding estimates for the age of mineral specimens of up to 2 billion years. As the technology of measurement has improved, a wider range of minerals and smaller samples have become available to dating technologies. Holmes' 1930s work needed kilogrammes of sample, hence he used lead minerals from lead mines ; modern dating can use nanogramme or picogramme samples - literally microscopic - and so a much wider range of rocks and minerals can be examined. So, within the era of radiogenic dating, the estimated age of the Earth has changed from "greater than 2 billion years" (using the lead minerals which cannot be the original material of the Earth, being embedded within other rocks which could not be dated at that time) to "greater than 4.1 billion years" (for microscopic re-cycled grains of the mineral zircon found in the Jack Hills metamorphosed water-interacted sediments of central Australia). Which is not a huge change, given the changes in capability of measurement.
Please note : these are the ages of minerals formed on the Earth's surface ; therefore they must be younger than the Earth as a whole.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The Phase Equilibria do matter, Much of geophysics is based on lab experiments that try to match conditions at model temperatures and pressures. The result appears to be that the phase boundary for metal alloys as solid vs. liquid at the pressures in the earth's core allows for a higher temperature at the modeled pressure. This has significance in modeling the thernal history of the core. Eventually the core will freeze when the temperature drops so the molten phases freeze. That will have dire consequences for us on the surface for the geomangnetic dynamo that makes the magnetic field that protects life as we know it from high-energy particles from the sun and cosmos will collapse. It prevents the solar wind from eroding away our atmosphere, for example, compounding the risk to life from high-energy radiation. The history of the core may be important to plate tectonics, which is essential to the history of life on Earth.
Mars is probably lifeless today and lost what life it may have had, or it never had the chance to evolve into anything complex because its core froze too soon in its history. The solar wind has blown off its atmosphere and if it had any plate tectonics, it has long since shut down.
It is the decay of radioactive isotopes that occur naturally in the material of the solar system that when collected together in the core of a planet heat it up and melt its interior allowing for processes like we see on earth. We own our very existence to these processes. Mars will tell us all about that.
Sulphur (however spelled, correctly or Americanly) hasn't been called "brimstone" since we have a scientifically useful concept of "element".
True, but people familiar with the Bible only through pop-cultural osmosis might have heard of the expression "fire and brimstone" but not have actually read modern translations of Revelation that refer to "sulfur"/"sulphur".