[HN Gopher] A mineral produced by plate tectonics has a global c...
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A mineral produced by plate tectonics has a global cooling effect,
study finds
Author : wglb
Score : 35 points
Date : 2023-12-05 03:03 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| dadjoker wrote:
| Great article - right up to this quote:
|
| "And this is also the way forward for us to find solutions for
| this climatic catastrophe. If you study these natural processes,
| there's a good chance you will stumble on something that will be
| actually useful."
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I feel like that's just sensationalism to get more media
| attention. The existing clay is formed by tectonic activity
| over a long period of time and using lots of energy (ie the
| earth's core moving tectonic plates). Any artificial
| manufacturing effort would require similar energy input and
| it's highly likely it requires more energy to create the clay
| artificially than it was to burn whatever amount of carbon gets
| sequestered (just guessing based on thermodynamics). So I don't
| see how this clay helps us. It might be more efficient to
| create new clay than our existing recapture techniques although
| I would be skeptical.
| lainga wrote:
| I want to see some numbers. It's just porous mafic rock (i.e.
| pumice) in the presence of hot seawater.
|
| ed. wait, no, it's felsic? but it forms quickly in marine
| environment... either way, there's a lot of it
| onionisafruit wrote:
| You included only the second part of the quote. The full quote
| is:
|
| "If you want to understand how nature works, you have to
| understand it on the mineral and grain scale, and this is also
| the way forward for us to find solutions for this climatic
| catastrophe. If you study these natural processes, there's a
| good chance you will stumble on something that will be actually
| useful."
|
| I don't see anything wrong with including Jagoutz's thoughts on
| this. Maybe you disagree, but including it in the article gives
| us an idea of the authors' thinking.
| gumby wrote:
| I wonder how easy it would be to produce something with similar
| structure in volume. It doesn't sounds like a nanoscale structure
| and wouldn't have to be clay.
|
| Not because nature can surely made larger volumes (this is plate
| tectonics after all) but to do it faster and in higher volume
| than we could extract from the ocean floor. Who knows how long
| the weathering takes, and its statistical prevalence.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Because I can never pass up a chance to mention it, the fiery
| core of the Earth that's moving those plates around is an
| approximately 45 terawatt engine; human civilization is
| currently around 19 terawatts.
|
| Obviously we're not going to devote our entire economy to
| producing a mineral, and we're talking about millions of years
| versus decades, but it's still crazy to me that humans and the
| Earth itself operate on the same energy-scale.
| redblacktree wrote:
| That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing. That really puts
| the scale of human activity into context.
| Arrath wrote:
| > the fiery core of the Earth that's moving those plates
| around is an approximately 45 terawatt engine; human
| civilization is currently around 19 terawatts
|
| Oh wow that is mind blowing! I would have thought we were at
| a smaller proportion, to be honest.
| saalweachter wrote:
| If you want to feel small again, on the other end of
| things, 173,000 terawatts of sunlight hits the Earth.
| Earth's biosphere uses something like 1% of that (depending
| on your definition of "used", but whatever), so we have
| Earth's biosphere at something like 1700 terawatts,
| dwarfing both us and Earth's fiery core.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'm skeptical we create a level of power near 50% of the
| entire heat of the inner planet.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Surprisingly, it is true:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy#Resources
|
| _The Earth 's internal thermal energy flows to the surface
| by conduction at a rate of 44.2 terawatts (TW) [21], and is
| replenished by radioactive decay of minerals at a rate of
| 30 TW. [22]_
|
| [21] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/93
| RG0124...
|
| [22] https://web.archive.org/web/20120217184740/http://geoh
| eat.oi...
| etskinner wrote:
| The sibling comment to this one helps clear this up: In
| short, they're not talking about the entire heat of the
| inner planet. They're talking about the rate at which heat
| that is transferred to the surface of the planet, not the
| thermal energy of the interior of the planet.
| jl6 wrote:
| ~180,000TWh of annual human energy production vs ~
| 3,000,000,000,000,000TWh of thermal energy inside Earth.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Power is not the same as energy obviously, but otherwise
| it _is_ the rate at which the thermal energy is spent.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > the entire heat of the inner planet
|
| ... is an energy figure, not a power figure, unless you
| mean either the rate at which heat is added through
| thermal decay, or the rate at which heat is lost through
| conduction to the surface, both of which are at the same
| mid-ten-terrawatts order of magnitude as human power
| usage.
| graypegg wrote:
| Over the many nuclear reactors, hydro stations, geothermal
| stations (which I guess is kind of cheating since it
| measures energy twice), tidal power stations, solar panels,
| wind turbines, gas and coal fired generators, and all the
| other odd-ball power generation devices used around the
| world, I could believe it. The heat can only get to a place
| where we actually measure it via lots of thermal mass that
| would slow things down.
|
| The energy emitted from the core of the earth, and human
| generated power combined is most likely dwarfed by the
| equivalent watts from sunlight alone.
|
| Assuming the low "realistic" estimate [0], the total amount
| of watts hitting the earth at any one time is 694.2 TW
| [1]... instantaneously. So that would add up much quicker.
|
| Edit: I'm an idiot, the sun doesn't face the whole earth at
| once. It would still be a lot at half that though!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Solar_constant
| [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.361+*+5.10064
| 4719%...
| lainga wrote:
| Integrated over the course of a day, total disk solar
| irradiance for a rotating planet is 1/4 the solar
| constant. And in our specific planetary case, about 27%
| is reflected without reaching ground. So the effective
| whole-day whole-Earth "solar constant" at ground level is
| about (1362 W/m^2) * 0.25 * (1 - 0.27) ~= 250 W/m^2.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#/me
| dia...
| thriftwy wrote:
| Obviously, only a very tiny proportion of that power is spent
| towards making the clays that we needed. We could spend a
| fraction of what we have and still outdo Earth by orders of
| magnitude.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Yeah, but we're also talking about out-doing it by about
| six orders of magnitude, to produce millions of years of
| production by the Earth in mere years by man.
|
| So I'm not sure which one I'd bet on.
| beAbU wrote:
| Is the 49TW the total amount of energy the earth radiates
| from the core?
|
| I'm struggling to reason about this. The core is a hot mass
| of matter, that's slowly cooling down. There is no energy
| "produced" here, no? So where does the 49TW go?
|
| Edit: my questions got answered by someone posting a
| wikipedia link elsewhere:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy#Resources
|
| Seems energy is being produced by means of radioactive decay.
| ecoffey wrote:
| Makes me think of this project: https://www.vesta.earth/
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(page generated 2023-12-05 23:00 UTC)