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New Research Suggests Earth's Mantle Might Be Hotter Than Anyone Expected (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from ScienceAlert: New data suggests that the upper parts of Earth's mantle are around 60C (108F) hotter than previously expected. The mantle is the layer between our planet's super-hot core and outer crust, and it plays an incredibly important role in things like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tectonic shifts. But despite the impact the mantle has on our planet, scientists have always struggled to pinpoint its temperature, and new research suggests our previous estimates were off the mark. If the new estimates made by scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington DC are verified, it would mean the mantle is melting shallower than previously expected, and it could change the way we predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The new estimates are based on the fact that the Earth's upper mantle is more affected by the presence of water in its minerals than we've assumed in the past. One of the most common ways to measure the temperature of the upper mantle is to analyze lava emerging from mid-ocean ridges - an underwater mountain range where two plates meet and hot mantle is drawn up and partially melts. So to more accurately measure the temperature at which this would melt, the researchers, led by Emily Sarafian, have used a new technique to add a quantifiable amount of water into mantle samples through tiny particles of the mineral olivine. This allowed them to more accurately measure the melting point of peridotite under mantle-like pressures in the presence of known amounts of water. "Small amounts of water have a big effect on melting temperature, and this is the first time experiments have ever been conducted to determine precisely how the mantle's melting temperature depends on such small amounts of water," said one of the researchers, Erik Hauri. They found that the potential temperature of the mantle beneath the oceanic crust is on average around 60C higher than previous estimates - with some parts much hotter than that. "Our experimental results indicate that mantle potential temperatures along all ocean spreading centers are hotter than existing estimates," the team writes in Science.
"Small amounts of water have a big effect on melting temperature, and this is the first time experiments have ever been conducted to determine precisely how the mantle's melting temperature depends on such small amounts of water"
Apparently these guys have never modified a car engine to inject water/meth. Car guys have known this for years except they use cooler words like stoichiometry.
Admittedly, it is pretty cool that they are relating it to the earths mantle but, come on... everyone knows the earth is hollow anyway...
In the article the Celsius to Fahrenheit converter seems to have failed.
I'd be happy the day that Fahrenheit is passed on to history together with other obsolete forms of measurements with strange conversion factors.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
A tax on volcanoes should help curb mantle warming.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For those who don't want to look for the other half of the summary in the links:
Previous estimates have put temperatures ranging from anywhere between 500 to 900C (932 to 1,652F) near the crust, to 4,000C (7,230F) closer to Earth's core.
When someone tells you their model of the earth's temperature is predictive a century or two out.
I mean it isn't as if the radiation profile emitted by the earth is determined by it's temperature /sarcasm.
That's some chutzpah considering we can't even dig 1/2 way through the crust.
I like how humans describe and imagine layers of the space they live in; the Earth mantle, the stratosphere, etc...
We even have pictures with the "borders" between each layers depicted ;-)
It's all in our heads really, there is no clear border between these layers, the Earth is just a mass with the center still warmer than the surface.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Without degree sign aka (which does exist even in Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1 & friends btw), 60C means : sixty Coulomb (a unit of electric charge) and 108F means seventy Farad (an electric capacitance unit you might know if you are in DIY those days) !
Degree sign must be used before C and F to indicate degree Celcius and degree Farenheit.
Kelvin (the unit scientific uses for temperature) does not need a degree sign to be used because it is not relative but absolute.Hence, we would write 333.15K (which is the same as 60C/108F), and it would be fine.
US citizens will take note that Kelvin is using the upper K, where as the prefix multiplier kilo (thousand) is a lower case k like in 3.3k, 3.3kg, 1200km, 250km/h ... and by the way, can you people stop to translate 75mph as 120kph ... "p" means "pico" which is a prefix in the SI unit world, that's why we simply write 120km/h.
... of my post were dumped ... This is a plot from the famous US stonecutters ;-) And this is maybe what has happened to the original article ... dooh. Why on earth are we stuck with non unicode friendly /. in 2017 ?!? Not even a Latin-1 friendly ?
Quick Test :
euro sign : €
c with cedil : ç
degree sign :
a upper cased with circumflex : Â
n with tilda : ñ
According to test ... degre sign will be trashed even during preview ... odd, I thought /. was UTF-8 now.
moreover, for temperature differences one should always use Kelvin, not Celsius (at least that's the rule in scientific circles).
It is because Kelvin heads hang around in scientific circles. Come on, a 10C difference and a 10K difference is the same damn thing. Get over it!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
For some unusual reason, every time i see the movie, i stop, sit down and watch it. good job to all the actors.
Very interesting once and knowledgeable one for all level peoples. Thank you for posting this much informative blogs.
Interesting facts abut Earth
EVERYONE wants it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As an American Slashdot reader, for all science articles I suggest that you stop providing both metric and imperial units. Metric is fine with us. Really.
If we need the conversion, we can do it in our heads. Most importantly, it will improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the comments by eliminating the ever-present unit-conversion threads.
Don't you realize that the Metric System came from a bunch of head choppers? Who also had a Metric Calendar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We need to do away with everything Metric System.
Obviously, this is the result of global warming, since mankind has always had a greater effect on the climate than we are willing to acknowledge.
And be sure to make it a progressive tax. Tax those 1 percenters like Yellowstone at a higher rate than Vesuvius.
A tax on volcanoes should help curb mantle warming.
It won't help. Smart people all knew that global warming starts with warming the GLOBE. Soon, scientists are going to show that the mantle has been growing progressively hotter since we started tracking temperatures, and forecasting out 100 years, we're going to be hopping around because the ground is too hot,or walking on stilts.
The climate change scientists will get into a fight about it because while this accounts for ice melting, it also means that instead of flooding the world's coastlines, the increasing heat is going to start boiling off water.
The religious people are going to jump in because the constant water loss will cause mostly perpetual rainfall, leading to Flood #2, and the world being re-cleansed by God.
Businesses will race to recalibrate to making boats, ships, and arks.
Waterworld surges back as a cult classic, and Kevin Costner enters "demigod" status as most of the world uses the movie as a literal planning tool.
108 degrees. Really?
So... Just how hot is the mantel then? An extra 60 degrees on top of a million degrees is nothing. But 60 on top of 1,000 is.
How hot is it?
It is hot enough to melt the hinges off the gates to hell.
How hot is it?
It is hotter than the tongue of your ex-wife.
Next!
...is global warming.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
60 Coulomb is quite much electric charge.
Or did you miss to write out the degree sign? 60C is not the same as 60ÂC.
Certainly it does. If I say "I cupped her breast, and put that gal on the road to ecstasy", everyone knows exactly what I mean.
See you liter.
No, sorry.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
<TomLehrer>
Base eight is the same as base ten.
If you're missing two fingers.
</TomLehrer>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
um... which planet? Because which atmosphere?
Also, are we talking the instantaneous, average, mean or median pressure at the point of reference? Or something else?
And about altitude... ASL? And if so, average, high tide, low tide, and which tide? Assuming there might be a moon (or several) involved. And what if there is more than one sea, and so more than one sea level?
No. I'm sorry.
This is the boiling point of water: When the bubbles start coming off the bottom of the teapot.
Nothing else matters.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you're doing this on paper, you're doing it wrong. This is an extremely poor rationale for a modern measurement system.
Computers don't care what system you use. And if you actually want to hit Mars instead of just go on an extended tour of interplanetary space, you'd best use a computer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The people who run this place don't give the north end of a southbound rat about our ability to write well-formatted posts; all they care about is shoving ads in our faces.
That's assuming they can even understand the slashcode, which is perhaps a leap too far. There's no evidence of that, either.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Speak for yourself. There are a lot of people on this earth who grew up using the english measurement system and it is discriminatory (as well as misleading) to publish information that does not provide numbers in forms people can intuitively understand.
What's next, would you start taking away the Libraries Of Congress unit too? Your path is slippery and evil.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ScienceAlert.com incorrectly credits this work to scientists at the Carnegie Institution.
In fact, Paul Asimow at Carnegie wrote a "Perspective" (comment) for the journal "Science," but as you can see in the published paper, the research was actually done by first author Emily Sarafian and colleagues at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
This is why it is important to go to the primary sources when possible, instead of relying on a news report which, in this case, was not correct.
measure the melting point of peridotite under mantle-like pressures
I understand they need a correct value for mantle-like pressures in order to get mantle temperature. But how do we evaluate mantle-like pressures?