Slashdot Mirror
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
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"!
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
Big deal. That's like the difference between December and July in the Midwest.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The surface of the sun is practically ice-cold compared to its own core.
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.
Actually it is possible to get a great education in the US. Most don't because the system is set up to encourage you to just do enough to get by. If, however, you are highly motivated and or have parents that encourage and demand that you strive for the best then you can go far indeed. The problem is that the average are left in the dirt.
That's because everybody tends to use the metric Helen (1k ship launching capability) instead of the more accurate Troy Helen (1.186k ships)...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
We've not even been to the deepest depths of the ocean. . . .
Actually, we have.
In a word, geology. Actually worth learning something about before claiming it's all BS.
For all we know Earth is dirt all the way down
Are you sure it's dirt and not turtles?
this phrase was used by geologist wearing beer goggles...
Given the orders of magnitude and error bars involved and that the temperature at the core is all theory in the first place, ice-cold is far to precise.
Just use absolute-zero cold.
The temperature of the surface of the sun is smaller than the error bounds on our theories about the the temperature of the core. Thus if you are comparing them you might as well treat the surface temp as 0 and save a subtraction...
No, the core is not hot enough to sustain fusion. 6000 degrees is not enough for fusion. Not in the earth's core, not on the surface of the sun either. The sun doesn't do fusion on the surface. It does fusion deep inside, where the temperature is millions of degrees. The earth and the sun have one thing in common - both are much hotter inside than on the surface. . .
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/millihelen
millihelen (plural millihelens)
(informal) A unit of measure of pulchritude, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. [quotations ]
That is good ROFL
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
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".