Another fact of Earth's ever changing amazing reality:
Greenland was once upon a time a tropical country. That is proved absolutely by the remains of an extensive tropical flora which are found there. Where now a sheet of solid ice over a mile thick covers mountain and valley, and mighty frozen rivers called glaciers make their way to the sea and hatch icebergs, there was in earlier days a verdure-clad wilderness of luxuriant vegetation. Together with the palms and tree ferns, there were trees related to the giant sequoias of our own west coast; also representatives of the "gingko," the sacred tree of Japan and of the Eucalyptus family, which today is restricted to Australia. Climbing vines festooned the trunks of these monarchs of an ancient forest with draperies of foliage, while close to the ground grew those curious dwarf trees called "cycads," somewhat resembling palms in miniature, in the midst of a tangled undergrowth of ferns and other flowerless plants that carpted the densely wooded areas.
BTW Larry, Human's had absolutely nothing to do with it. Not one stinking thing.
Get over your self imposed statistical human sense of science man greatness. Cus it aint gonna do a thing to change the inevitable dynamic nature of planet earth.
First of all, I don't really like the term "Geo Engineering." One of the more useful earth science degrees is geological engineering. I will use the term as you guys are, though.
The Mississippi River is a classic case of "geo-engineering."
Fluvial dominated deltas are just deltas that are dominated by fluvial, or river, processes rather than tide or wave dominated deltas.
The Mississippi Delta has that classic "bird foot" appearance that is the signature of a delta dominated by fluvial processes, which is one of my main areas of work.
You can look at the delta and see a number of distributary channels as the river hits the gulf of mexico. There is one main distributary channel at this time. As the river hits sea level it begins to dump its sediment load. The distributaries also build natural levees during high flow events when the distributary jumps its banks and immediately dumps its sediment load.
This leads to progradation of that particular delta fan. It progrades outward until the riverbed is actually above sea level. During a really high flow event, the distributary will eventuall jump its bank by avulsion and begin to create a new delta lobe. There are also usually a number of crevasse splays, which are basically small sub channels of the main distributary.
The whole shebang looks like this:
Credit: BASE104
The old delta lobes sink as the weight of overburden squeezes the water out of the shales which surround the sand deposit of the old channel proper. This goes on again and again and again. Mud is about 90% water, and over time it gets squeezed by overlying sediment or simply dewaters under its own weight. This causes massive and quick subsidence.
The Mississippi has historically jumped and created a new distributary load about every 1000 years, and it would do so tomorrow if the Corps of Engineers quit their never ending battle to keep the distributary bed below sea level enough. That is a never ending battle that will be lost eventually. The river will avulse through the Atchafalaya River channels NW of New Orleans, and the lobe which contains New Orleans and all of that industry will sink below the waves. New Orleans is constantly sinking right now because there is no new sediment being deposited and the muds beneath it are de-watering into shales.
Right now the Corps of Engineers is constantly dredging the Mississippi River in an attempt to keep the channel from breaching and then beginning a new lobe, which will be located in an area where the water is deep enough to provide accomodation space for the sediment to deposit in the new delta. It almost happened a few decades ago. The River was at a super high flood stage and actually jumped into the Atchafalaya River basin, which has a steep shoreface and lots of accomodation space.
Here is a kind of groovy graphic from wiki that shows various lobes of the Mississipi delta over the last 5000 years:
Credit: BASE104
This would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that New Orleans sits on the current lobe, which is being artificially kept alive by dredging of the channel and controlling its direction by dikes and dams.
I remember my first sedimentary petrology professor saying that New Orleans would eventually become a mud hole, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
This is true. All the Corps of Engineers is accomplishing is slowing the process down. Eventually that current lobe will build so far out to sea that it will be force to take off down the Atchafalaya and create a new lobe. All of this engineering that is keeping New Orleans and all of its associated industry above water is going to be a failure. I doubt that even the Corps will refute that.
that happened over millions of years,and,what your quoting ,chef ,is science!it did not happen at the rate it is today,absolutely proven!you are quite the example of a man of science
Boy are you smart Chief. There are dinosaur beds in the arctic and fern fossils in the Antarctic.
The first question this leads to is WHERE was that continent at that time? Continents are wandering all over the place, so was it at a tropical latitude at that time?
OK. You tell me how to solve that problem.
Hint: It is easy if you know anything about geology.
Geology was just starting to get a grip on the huge expanse of time when Darwin was contemplating evolution. Interestingly, the geologists started untangling those time scales, we'd say "geological time scales," by doing simple things like observing the rate that stuff gets buried. Debbie mentioned the other day that Darwin's last paper was on the work of earthworms, who mix up the soils and effectively raise the level of the ground.
When they put all this together they got times much longer than the physicists of those days... Kelvin calculated the time it would take a molten sphere the size of the Earth to cool to present day temperatures. The calculations held that the Earth's age was relatively young, something like 20 million to 400 million years.
He was missing the fact that Uranium heats the Earth from radioactive decay, radioactivity was discovered in 1896 during Kelvin's lifetime, but fission wasn't discovered until 1938.
Darwin had reasoned that evolution needed more time to happen then 10s of millions of years, and stated that if the age of the Earth turned out to be "young" then evolution was not the explanation for "the origin of species." Turned around it was a prediction of evolution, that the age of the Earth be more on the order of billions of years, though I don't think an explicit calculation was done.
Geology also has it's break through moments, the idea of plate tectonics, which we so casually invoke today was accepted by the geology community in 1965...
... maybe the geologists that post here can fill us in on that interesting bit of scientific work, and what it takes, in terms of explanation, for something to be "accepted." Before that time, most of the "guts" in the scientific community "felt" that the major geological features were fixed, unchanging in time.
Reconstructing the past climate is also something that we take for granted but has been an area of research in these last few decades, and interestingly helps to inform us in terms of what "natural" climate change is and provides a baseline from which "unnatural" departures can be measured.
Everything we know about the past climate we know from this research.
Weather is an other area of practical concern, and as we know, weather prediction while imperfect has become amazingly more adept over the last few decades. It is natural to extend the forecast tools to longer periods and larger area... though the forecast tools also required additional science to be input to get plausible behavior, which is defined as the ability to match the climate we've reconstructed, and the recent climate we've been able to measure.
All of these research areas start out interested in questions that had nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change. But that is the conclusion that popped out of the studies, and a surprising one at first, though understandable once the details are looked at carefully.
We cannot understand current climate without including the effects of human activity, the result of energy production. From a researcher's point of view the conclusion is not very controversial, it is the hypothesis which is consistent with the broadest set of data available.
Other hypotheses come up lacking, they are looked at carefully and tested in detail... they fail, by and large, to explain what we are looking at.
How people use the results of this research to decide what to do is an open question.
chefs last ,refers to deposition and cementation of fossils ,which on the short side,has been determined to have happened millions of years ago.fact i am pretty sure these facts,even w/dating procedures are not accepted.
First of all, I don't really like the term "Geo Engineering." One of the more useful earth science degrees is geological engineering.
Personally I regret that the term "frakking" has lost its usefulness as a nerd curse due to re-purposing as shorthand for hydraulic fracturing, but that's probably off topic.
Anyway, good post on why NO unfortunately is doomed.
The first question this leads to is WHERE was that continent at that time? Continents are wandering all over the place, so was it at a tropical latitude at that time?
Precisely!
You just proved my point again BASE. Cus it just doesn't matter "where they WERE back then or now or tomorrow. They moved on account of the dynamic forces of natural geological change.
Then, Now and the Future... you nor any of your or ED's Science Man material world PhD's and human endorsed analyzing abilities are gonna ever change nor control any of it. Never.
you nor any of your or ED's Science Man material world PhD's and human endorsed analyzing abilities are gonna ever change nor control any of it. Never.
So why are you against geoengineering when it cant even change anything about the climate or the earth?
Plate tectonics was huge when it was first proposed. Of course, any idiot could look at a world map and see that the west side of the Atlantic and the east side of the Atlantic fit together nicely like puzzle pieces.
The full theory came out later. While there were a huge number of old stick in the muds, that wasn't bad, because it begged hard questions.
Prior to Plate Tectonics, the theory was called, "Geosynclinal Theory." Geosynclinal Theory is a total mess and makes very poor predictions.
It took five years or so for Plate Tectonics to really sink in, but it opened up a whole new way of explaining things and led to endless further work. The Theory is a good one, because it fits like a glove.
That is what makes a good theory. It not only explains everything that is known at the time it was born, but also stands all future tests that come along later. Plate Tectonics is an exquisite theory, and no way could I list all of the tests it has survived.
Dating rocks is pretty easy now. Granitic Igneous rocks have zircons in them, and zircons are chemically very stable. You can isolate the zircons from a small sample and perform U-Pb dating that is now very, very, accurate. Using U-Pb zircon dating, most of the continental crust of the entire world has been dated with a high degree of precision. That has made it possible to do really old dating. You can actually see the acretion of different small chunks of floating continental crust slam into each other over time, and totally reconstruct the history of continental crust.
To find out WHERE a rock was when it was deposited involves several methods. One being basic geology. If you have one rock in England and the same rock in New England, it is evidence that at one time these rocks were connected. Paleontology is much the same. The distribution of fossils tells a lot.
The coolest and newest way to figure out where a rock was is paleomagnetic measurement. Almost all rocks, including sedimentary rocks, have minerals that are susceptible to magnetism to one degree or another. When the rock was deposited and lithified, those minerals were lined up like little compass needles.
You can't tell where the rock was in longitude, but you can tell where it was in latitude. Paleomagnetic study is a huge tool in most types of geology. One of my old profs is a big paleomag guy.
Most of the rocks in the world have been studied for their paleomagnetic signature, but a buddy of mine just got a paper published on part of Borneo during some past time (I haven't read the paper). Each piece of the puzzle has been nicely falling into place for decades now.
By the way, the Cretaceous dinosaur beds along the Colville River on the north slope of Alaska were actually a few hundred miles closer to the pole when they were deposited. This is pretty wild having dinosaurs that close to the north pole, along with a temperate flora fossil assemblage.
Paleoclimate is now a big deal. I was checking out the class schedule at my old university and the first two geology classes are heavy on paleoclimate. I live about 6 blocks away, so I ought to drag my old ass down there and audit them.
Like many worker bees with a science background, the sheer volume of publications is just too huge for me to keep up with. I have had to specialize in just a couple of areas of sedimentary geology. Most people, even the igneous guys, seem to think that sedimentary geology is just looking at a pile of sand, but it is such a deep topic. I can look at one grain of sand and tell you a nice story regarding its history.
Geology is a really fun science to study. Pay is also good if you have a kid starting college.
The volume of information that is known about the Earth would boggle your mind. Just reading Ed's comments I can tell that I would have a great time drinking beer and shooting the sh#t about geology. To really understand it takes months at least. By understanding it, I mean to just grasp it.
It is very fun.
Right now I am mapping a fluvial dominated delta sequence. I would love to post maps and cross sections, but I would get fired and then sued. That's what sucks about science and business in the same room.
I have no idea what Chief is saying, but let me make a stab at it.
Trying to stop the movement of a drifting plate is not currently possible. No news there.
Back in the twenties, a bunch of shortgrass prairie was plowed up for wheat. A drought came along a few years later and all of that exposed soil went flying towards Europe. Who knows where all of that topsoil went.
Humans can make an effect on the environment.
What would happen if we detonated the nuclear arsenal of every country on the planet? That would be another example of a human caused event.
Changing the composition of the atmosphere itself is something that should not be taken lightly. Ozone, for example. Ozone is what attenuates ultraviolet solar radiation. Without it, we would be bombarded by a lot more UV than before.
UV radiation causes cancer and who knows what impact it has on the other plants and animals.
I remember Reagan telling everyone to "Wear a hat."
The chemistry behind CFC's and Ozone depletion is well understood. I am pretty sure that the Ozone Holes are natural, though. I was yacking about it with my cloud physics buddy a few weeks ago.
I wish I could get him on here posting. He is a monster mind in meteorology. Maybe I can get him to post. He just had back surgery and is done for the semester. He was teaching this semester.
He climbed a little at Devil's Lake BITD, so maybe I can talk him into it, though. I think that he has better things to do than try to talk to Chief, though. I'll try anyway. He is f*#king hilarious.
I remember my first sedimentary petrology professor saying that New Orleans would eventually become a mud hole, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
This is true. All the Corps of Engineers is accomplishing is slowing the process down. Eventually that current lobe will build so far out to sea that it will be force to take off down the Atchafalaya and create a new lobe. All of this engineering that is keeping New Orleans and all of its associated industry above water is going to be a failure. I doubt that even the Corps will refute that.
When New Orleans got hurricane hosed, it seems like a stupid idea to just rebuild it right where it is as another hosing seemed inevitable. That, and this other geologic inevitability. This is sadly an example of how humans seem incapable of making changes in the face of the inevitable (no matter what the eventual cause is.
The first question this leads to is WHERE was that continent at that time? Continents are wandering all over the place, so was it at a tropical latitude at that time?
Precisely!
You just proved my point again BASE. Cus it just doesn't matter "where they WERE back then or now or tomorrow. They moved on account of the dynamic forces of natural geological change.
Then, Now and the Future... you nor any of your or ED's Science Man material world PhD's and human endorsed analyzing abilities are gonna ever change nor control any of it. Never.
Chief, you're not really being honest in your considerations of the time frames involved. To make an analogy, everybody reading this post in 2012 is almost certain to be dead within 120 years. So why quit smoking? Death is inevitable so why do anything about it or think that our actions will affect that, because they won't. Whatever we do, Yur gonna die
And this earth is toast, the sun's gunna supernova and toast this place, so why even have pollution laws?
Based on my New Orleans example, I'm skeptical humans will do anything significant about climate change until it's too late, and even when we see how our inaction will result in rising sea levels and other catastrophic changes, I doubt we'll even move the cities that will become the new Atlantis. But none of that means humans aren't causing climate change. I light a candle in my van and it gets a bit warmer. The atmosphere is a big place but just walk around LA or Mexico City and it's plain that we affect it
base ,geology is a great science,more should be commonly known.i am no expert,but will defend.i am glad there is work in it
Geology is a fun science for non-geologists. I work with a bunch of money men, who after decades in the oil business, know a surprising amount about basic geology.
John McPhee wrote a great series of three books on geology. He later put them together with a 4th chapter in a book called:
Annals Of The Former World by John McPhee.
It won the Pulitzer for non-fiction, and geologists absolutely love those books. McPhee managed to get in on cutting edge stuff and make it easy to understand.
I know his daughter and son-in-law, so I got a first edition hard copy signed for me and Minerals (Bryan Law). He was very cool.
That is a fun read.
Chief says another idiotic thing. I am a petroleum geologist. I get paid to tell people where to drill. I am a type of economic geologist, meaning that I have to find enough reserves to pay for the well and make a profit.
I have a well that just spud (spud means started drilling). It is a horizontal well through a pretty thin pay zone. I will be steering it for the next month. I get paid pretty good for this. The drilling and completion costs are around 3 million bucks. I have a 1% royalty, so I get monthly checks off of production.
The insides of a big exploration company are filled to the gills with scientists. The technology is amazing. So saying scientists have no place in business is stupid. There are very few businesses that have zero scientific needs. Even Ed said that a lot of his current work is applied physics.
Applied science pretty much makes the world go around economically. I'm sure that The Chief will do a 180 and attack that statement now.
I have no idea of what the Chief DOES like.
OK. Off to work. I wish that I could entertain some of you through the drilling and steering. It is super cool how it all works. Technological advancements are constantly coming in that area of BUSINESS.
John McPhee was a writer for the New Yorker for a long time. He could pick any topic and make it fascinating. He has a book that is just about oranges and it is terrific. I had no idea that Oranges were that complicated.
He also wrote a book about nuclear weapons called, The Curve Of Binding Energy.
That book is wild. McPhee hung out a lot with a weapons designer named Ted Taylor (I think that is the name). He was a super interesting guy. His contribution was pretty much making nukes smaller. He even built the smallest device that would actually blow up rather than fizzle.
After he retired or quit, he became an anti-nuke activist. That happened to a bunch of the guys who worked on the Manhattan Project as well.
You would probably really like the book, Ed. I'm no dumbie. When I sent McPhee those two geology books for him to sign for me and Minerals, I also sent a copy of that book.
The Curve Of Binding Energy by John McPhee. That is a terrific book.
Right before I split. Sorry about dumping so many posts here...
Sure, continents wander around, past climate changed, great extinctions happened, and there is nothing we can do about it.
There are some things that we can do. One is to stop spewing CO2 into the atmosphere. During the Jurassic Cretaceous there was a big greenouse event caused by vulcanism which spewed a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere.
That was the period when Dinosaurs were near the poles and all that.
We can actually measure CO2 concentrations in the ancient atmosphere by doing counts of stomata (leaf breathing pores) density in fossil leaves. A favorite is the Ginkgo, which is a species that is truly ancient and survives to this day, even in my front yard.
The interesting thing about the Mesozoic event was that the climate change also caused a severe global anoxic event in the world's oceans. The shales deposited during that event actually sourced the oil fields in the middle east, but that is another matter.
You can grow Gingko's in the lab under differing CO2 partial pressures. If you add more CO2 then the leaf needs fewer stomata to perform its function.
Right now it looks like we are about half way to the CO2 concentrations of the Cretaceous. To get it all the way up to the Cretaceous level we will have to burn all of the oil and about half of the coal. Somewhere around those numbers.
You can also tell a lot about paleoclimate by studying oxygen isotope ratios in the tests (shells) of marine organisms.
The Oxygen isotope ratio science has been around for at least 30 years. The stomata density work is over twenty years old, so it isn't like it hasn't been attacked and defended.
The stomata density work is easy to understand.
Wiki has a terrific page explaining how to use oxygen isotope ratios to tell you how much water was tied up in ice at a particular time:
Let us know!