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NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Newsweek: Researchers at NASA have discovered a huge upwelling of hot rock under Marie Byrd Land, which lies between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, is creating vast lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. The presence of a huge mantle plume could explain why the region is so unstable today, and why it collapsed so quickly at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago. Mantle plumes are thought to be part of the plumbing systems that brings hot material up from Earth's interior. Once it gets through the mantle, it spreads out under the crust, providing magma for volcanic eruptions. The area above a plume is known as a hotspot.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
A "bimbo of a deal" is not a phrase a native English speaker would use.
I will bet you would also write a thousand dollars as, "1000$". Isn't that right, golubushka?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Until a gamma-ray burst or a wandering black hole takes us ALL out. Or maybe just a stay rock or "lone-wolf" terrorist messes up your day.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
... but I’m not sure what’s going on with the idiots posting further up in this discussion.
In addition to Yellowstone, there’s the plume responsible for the Hawaiian Islands. Interestingly, as the tectonic plate shifts, the plume remains more or less in the same place below it. Currently it’s under the Big Island (obviously); you can see the direction that the plate is moving by looking at the chain of islands.
#DeleteChrome
It's a cover up, I'm sure of that. This is to cover up the discovery of an ancient powerful alien device. This device is called a "door to the heavens", it's a transportation device that uses "Rosen-Einstein bridges" through space-time to allow people to travel astronomical distances seemingly instantly. One was found buried among ancient Egyptian artifacts and the other more recently found buried in the Antarctic ice. I have little doubt the power of this device is melting the ice. Perhaps this device has also attracted some unwanted attention from alien species? If that's the case then they have much more to cover up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It makes little difference if Trump personally supports the Paris agreement or not, since it was an aspirational target, the states, companies and people still support it. The people who implement it, still implement it.
You mean we don't need the government to save the planet? I completely agree. People don't need the government to mandate anything to save the planet. People can do this on their own, assuming the government is not preventing this in any way.
The problem with government is that it picks winners and losers. One example are these stupid CFL lightbulbs. There's a government subsidy on them, maybe it's gone now, but they suck. I don't know anyone that buys them any more. People will get LED lighting now, or use one of those new "efficient" incandescent bulbs. Maybe the mandate sped up the adoption of LED because people wanted something better. Maybe it slowed it down because money that was dumped in CFL was not invested in bringing LEDs to market.
Another problem with government is that it is slow. The CFL subsidy is also an example of this, it became obsolete almost as soon as it became law. If someone developed cold fusion tomorrow then it'd be tied up in all kinds of outdated regulations before it could come to market. At a minimum it'd have to compete with already subsidized wind and solar. Subsidies rarely help anything, it can just as easily hurt.
Trump did the right thing on getting out of this agreement. It did nothing that we could not do on our own without it. I believe that we'd be better off if the government had a lighter hand on the environment. Sure, keep the air and water clean, but there is a thing as taking it too far. The EPA did a lot of good things in the past, but it became an agency without much to do very quickly. Instead of shrinking to fit the much smaller role it needed to fulfill, it grew and created new "problems" to solve. The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA. They failed. I suspect that they will always fail because the people within the department will always have the suspicion that if they actually solve the problem then their jobs are at risk. Just like the DEA will never ever "win" the "war on some drugs". US DHS will never "win" the "war on terror". Has the Department of Education ever actually educated anyone? If people learned anything from them then it can't be anything good.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Indeed, new data appears every day. The debate would be over tomorrow though if people accepted the economics of anything related to CAGW.
The reason we burn coal, oil, and natural gas is because they are cheap. We can say they are abundant, reliable, and energy dense but that's just another way of calling them cheap. Solar power is expensive because it's unreliable, diffuse, and not necessarily abundant where it's needed. People tend to want energy when it's cold and/or dark where they are, and this tends to happen with then sun isn't shining. Storing, moving, and converting energy adds costs which only adds to the expense of already expensive solar power.
How do we solve this problem? Look to energy sources that have a history of being cheaper than coal, oil, and natural gas. Those are wind, hydro, and nuclear. Wind and hydro suffer from many of the same problems as solar, such as not always being available where and when it's needed, which can add to the cost. Nuclear doesn't have this problem, it can be placed most anywhere we need it. We've even put this energy source to work on ships at sea.
I guess we could say the debate is in fact over, use more nuclear power. We do that then we have cheap and clean power and we'll just have to find something else for congresscritters to prop up as a bogeyman to get us to vote them back into office again and again.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
People don't need the government to mandate anything to save the planet. People can do this on their own, assuming the government is not preventing this in any way.
Isn't going to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA.
The primary job of the Department of Energy is nuclear safety. It is in charge of the country's nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors and nuclear waste. It also does energy research and other related things but nuclear safety comes first.
The nuclear cost problem is a regulatory problem.
If BMW had to design a car from scratch every time they built one, each one would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Same goes with nuclear. We don't build enough of them, so we don't become more skilled at doing it. So we over-engineer.
We should be designing a nuclear power plant, and building hundreds of identical ones in exactly the same way.
We should also encourage smaller, rather than larger and more expensive power plants. One can build smaller reactors on a production line rather than have to build them on site. This will drive down costs.
It is so hard to build nuclear plants that we can't create a production line of them in reality, and anyone who gets permission to build one wants to build the biggest they can, because that permission is hard to get.
Nuclear is expensive to build initially, given our current regulatory climate, but cheap to operate, and runs for years at 90% or more of nameplate capacity. What makes wind and solar cheap to install is that they are factory-built technologies. But now try to run them at more than a small fraction of nameplate.
Standardized nuclear, regulated by type instead of by individual installation, is what will replace the fossil baseload. Imagine how much an airline ticket would cost if Boeing had to get a full set of permits from multiple jurisdictions for each plane it built?
If you go to the last page of the report you linked to, where there is a nice chart that summarizes everything, tell me what you see? I see LCOE (levelized cost of energy/electricity) of natural gas, hydro, solar PV, and onshore wind being the cheapest, as I suspect most people expect. Geothermal costs are low too, but I'm not sure that can be used just anywhere.
Look at the LACE (levelized avoided cost of energy/electricity) which is the more complex analysis, everything evens out, except onshore wind wins on being 10% cheaper and solar loses on being 10% or 15% more expensive. If people want their energy to be cheap and low CO2 then it's wind, hydro, and nuclear. The report you gave just shows what I stated before.
Even with the simple LCOE numbers we see nuclear cheaper than coal, solar thermal, and offshore wind. As soon as people run out of rooftops to slap PV panels to, rivers to dam, and land to plant windmills, what are they supposed to do? Nuclear. If we are replacing natural gas because of it's CO2 output then we are going to hit a place where it is a choice between energy prices going up or nuclear.
If you think it's impossible to run out of rooftops and rivers then come out to the US Midwest where I live. Not a lot of sun and flowing water right now, and winter is just getting started.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The nuclear cost problem is a regulatory problem.
False. We have those regulations because of actual problems with nuclear reactors in the real world. The regulations were created to deal with problems which already existed. To the extent that those regulations are a problem for would-be nuclear operators, they are a good thing.
If BMW had to design a car from scratch every time they built one, each one would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
BMW pioneered new technology in the i3 that is going to make that claim completely false. Also, you don't have to redesign a reactor every time if you actually have one good reactor design to begin with, then you only have to change the site design. Apparently, no one has a good reactor design.
We should be designing a nuclear power plant, and building hundreds of identical ones in exactly the same way.
Why? No one has yet come up with a reasonable excuse as to why that is the best method. The former excuse was that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter", which was always a lie. Given that this is simply not the case, The People would never have accepted the risk of nuclear power if they'd been told the truth. They have to accept massive risk for no reward. They would pay less for renewables.
It is so hard to build nuclear plants that we can't create a production line of them in reality,
So wait, you are arguing that we should build a bunch of reactors all the same, but then you say that we can't actually do that even if we want to? So uh, what exactly was the point of your message? Just derailment and distraction, huh?
Nuclear is garbage. Uranium is the least concentrated ore we mine, so the secondary effects from the mining (virtually all of which is strip mining) are all out of proportion with the amount of fuel used. The fuel of course isn't actually used, and we don't actually have long-terms plan for dealing with it once it becomes waste. Breeder reactors are sufficiently complex and dangerous that nobody is even thinking about building enough of them to reprocess waste, and even that doesn't deal with all of the waste. If you build a small reactor you have most of the risk of a large reactor, and if you build a large reactor you're just concentrating large amounts of fuel. The only reactors with an allegedly flawless safety record are military PWRs. They require a sizable crew and frequent replenishment, and if the military has had a serious problem with one, they wouldn't tell us anyway — classified.
We know how to solve the problems with renewables going forward, and we don't know how to feasibly solve the problems with nuclear, so promoting nuclear is evil and/or stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can afford the moderation, but you Trumpanistas only have so many mod points to spend. If I jump on that grenade now, you can't throw it at someone else who can't take the hit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And if they fail all in the same way, the people around them are ...
... going to shut it down and fix it. This fix will also be mass produced and therefore inexpensive to implement.
You seem to think that a nuclear power plant can only fail in only one way, a mushroom cloud of radioactive debris. That's not how they work. Most every spectacular failure we've seen in a nuclear power plant is because they are all unique, no one can ever learn where all the gremlins are, and if a problem is found the fix is almost always very expensive because no other device in the world is just like this one. Which means when problems are found they might not get fixed.
We build devices with similar complexity, cost, and potential threat to life if they fail spectacularly. We call them passenger jets. One major difference between a passenger jet and a nuclear reactor is the reactor isn't six miles in the air with no where to land for hundreds of miles.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It has taken way too long to scroll down to this first on-topic post. But correcting the moderator system to limit the damage by paid trolls is another topic.
I have a serious question about the Antarctic mantle plume(s):
The Erebus plume under Ross Island has been documented ever since the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957 and probably earlier. So has a second plume been discovered in the same area? Or is this story about confirmation of what was already known? WTF?
Hopefully answers to this question will not get drowned by the paid trolls (and what I suspect may be paid troll fighters who keep the sewer floodgates open).
Federal Government moves were made before your lifetime to encourage people to move to California and its been riding that unnatural wave since.
Pretty silly, since nothing like that is necessary. Just sit back and let California be California, and people will move here. That's why this is the home of tech. When people have money, they want to live someplace that doesn't suck.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"