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Ancient bubbles in Australian rocks show early Earth's air weighed less (trunc)
The Telegraph UK ^ | 10 May 2016 04:37am | Chiara Palazzo, Sydney

Posted on 05/11/2016 12:34:28 AM PDT by blueplum

Full title: Ancient bubbles in Australian rocks show early Earth's air weighed less than half today's atmosphere

Air bubbles trapped in 2.7 billion-year-old Australian rock suggest the Earth's atmosphere weighed less than half of today and was much thinner than previously thought.

Researchers analysed the size of air bubbles that formed at the top and bottom of lava flows along the Beasley River in Western Australia's Pilbara region almost three billion years ago and used the data to calculate the atmospheric pressure at the time. The results suggest that the air at the time exerted at most half the pressure of today's atmosphere.

The findings, published on Monday in Nature Geoscience, reverse the commonly accepted idea that the early Earth had a thicker atmosphere to compensate for sunlight being about one fifth weaker than now. {snip} The result also reinforces Prof Buick’s 2015 finding that microbes were pulling nitrogen out of Earth’s atmosphere some three billion years ago.

“The levels of nitrogen gas have varied through Earth’s history, at least in Earth’s early history, in ways that people just haven’t even thought of before,” said co-author David Catling, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences. “People will need to rewrite the textbooks.”

(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Australia/New Zealand; Culture/Society; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: abiogenesis; atmosphere; biogenesis; davidkatling; earlyearth; earthscience; geoscience; microbes; nitrogen; originoflife; rogerbuick; sanjoysom; spacescience; uofwashington
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To: WhiskeyX

Oh thanks!


21 posted on 05/11/2016 4:42:07 AM PDT by GingisK
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To: SkyPilot
Pre-deluvian. The atmosphere was more oxygen rich. Less ultraviolet rays penetrated due to atmospheric water vapor. People lived much longer lives then.

I believe this is true.

If leading scientists were willing to test these propositions you listed, more scientists would likely find the truth of these matters, as opposed to merely extending the various popular narratives that keep their research funded but keep themselves and other human beings in the dark as to what has really happened in the past and when.
22 posted on 05/11/2016 4:42:56 AM PDT by Resettozero
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To: WhiskeyX

no pics or it didn’t happen ;-)


23 posted on 05/11/2016 4:51:35 AM PDT by Blueflag (Res ipsa loquitur: non vehere est inermus)
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To: rawcatslyentist

I was wondering how they knew the temp of the rock wasn’t hotter or cooler than more recent magma flows.


24 posted on 05/11/2016 5:00:47 AM PDT by reed13k
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To: wastedyears

More settled science...


25 posted on 05/11/2016 5:12:09 AM PDT by refermech
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To: blueplum
Whole lot of “suggest” going on. The title is trying to “show” the way.
26 posted on 05/11/2016 5:24:01 AM PDT by justrepublican (Screaming like a "Vexatious requester" at a Wellstone memorial...........)
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To: WhiskeyX

So is the Earth losing 50,000 tonnes per year of atmosphere?


27 posted on 05/11/2016 5:24:09 AM PDT by MRadtke (Light a candle or curse the darkness?)
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To: WhiskeyX
The Earth is losing nearly twice as much mass as it gains each year according to some estimates

Just out of curiosity, do you have a reference for that?
28 posted on 05/11/2016 6:01:48 AM PDT by farming pharmer ('Your work will warm you' - overheard in a Soviet gulag...)
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To: eCSMaster

That only works within a fixed volume (V). With an undefined volume, all we know is that P at sea level is about 15 psi. That means there is a total of about 15 pounds of air above every square inch of surface. It’s gravity that’s holding it there, not a volume constraint.


29 posted on 05/11/2016 6:21:56 AM PDT by norwaypinesavage (The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones)
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To: WhiskeyX
The Earth is losing nearly twice as much mass as it gains each year according to some estimates.

Are those estimates as accurate as those which are used in computer models that "prove" anthropogenic global warming? < /sarc >

30 posted on 05/11/2016 7:10:25 AM PDT by JimRed (Is it 1776 yet? TERM LIMITS, now and forever! Build the Wall, NOW!)
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To: blueplum

Carbon taxes should be retroactive over the 2.7 billion year life of the ancient air bubbles. At a buck a day, that is $2.7 billion. Heck, I could live well on that. AL Gore, eat my shorts.


31 posted on 05/11/2016 7:27:08 AM PDT by TheNext
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To: Fhios
I would imagine they conducted tests on similar lavas from the current time.

One of the remaining big unknowns would be the effect of the rock on the gas over billions of years, especially given the fact that the rock has probably been compressed and heated repeatedly.

There's a similar issue with CO2 samples from gas bubbles in ice cores, since CO2 readily dissolves in water.

32 posted on 05/11/2016 8:26:40 AM PDT by pierrem15 ("Massacrez-les, car le seigneur connait les siens")
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To: akalinin

“Just out of curiosity, do you have a reference for that?”

Earth Loses 50,000 Tonnes of Mass Every Year
February 5, 2012
According to some calculations, the Earth is losing 50,000 tonnes of mass every single year, even though an extra 40,000 tonnes of space dust converge onto the Earth’s gravity well, it’s still losing weight.

[....]

http://scitechdaily.com/earth-loses-50000-tonnes-of-mass-every-year/

Getting a Handle on How Much Cosmic Dust Hits Earth
Does Earth have a dust build-up problem?

Estimates vary of how much cosmic dust and meteorites enter Earth’s atmosphere each day, but range anywhere from 5 to 300 metric tons, with estimates made from satellite data and extrapolations of meteorite falls. Thing is, no one really knows for sure and so far there hasn’t been any real coordinated efforts to find out. But a new project proposal called Cosmic Dust in the Terrestrial Atmosphere (CODITA) would provide more accurate estimates of how much material hits Earth, as well as how it might affect the atmosphere.

“We have a conundrum – estimates of how much dust comes in vary by a factor of a hundred,” said John Plane from University of Leeds in the UK. “The aim of CODITA is to resolve this huge discrepancy.”
[....]
http://www.universetoday.com/94392/getting-a-handle-on-how-much-cosmic-dust-hits-earth/

Mass accumulation of Earth from interplanetary dust, meteoroids, asteroids and comets
Sandra Drolshagen1, Jana Kretschmer1, Detlef Koschny2,3, Gerhard Drolshagen2, Björn Poppe1
1 Universitätssternwarte Oldenburg, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heerstr. 114-118, D-26129 Oldenburg, Germany
sandra.drolshagen@uni-oldenburg.de
2 European Space Agency, ESA/ESTEC, Keplerlaan 1, NL-22001 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands
3 Chair of Astronautics, TU Munich, Boltzmannstr. 17, D-85748 Garching, Germany

The goal of this paper is to determine the mass that reaches the Earth as interplanetary material. For the large objects the flux model by Brown et al. (2002) was used which is valid for bodies greater than 1 m and is based on sensor data of fireballs that entered the Earth atmosphere. For the small sizes the flux model by Grün et al. (1985) was used, which describes the mass flux at 1 AU for meteoroids in the mass range 10-18 g to about 100 g. The Grün flux was converted to 100 km height by taking the Earth attraction into account and all units were adjusted to compare the model with the one by Brown. In a second step both models were combined by an interpolation, which lead to a flux model that covers 37 orders of magnitude in mass. Using recent measurements and alternative flux models the uncertainties of the obtained model was estimated. Recent measurements include in-situ impact data on retrieved space hardware and optical meteor data. Alternative flux models are e.g. a NASA model for large sizes that is an extrapolation of known Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and a model by Halliday et al. (1996) which is based on optical measurements of fireballs. Up to a diameter of 1 km the total calculated mass influx is 54 tons per day.

[....]

http://www.imo.net/imc2015/2015-24-drolshagensandra-final.pdf


33 posted on 05/11/2016 9:00:08 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
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To: WhiskeyX
Sweet. You learn something every day! I always wondered why we didn't end up fat & bloated like Jupiter from millions billions of years of accumulation..
34 posted on 05/11/2016 9:02:19 AM PDT by farming pharmer ('Your work will warm you' - overheard in a Soviet gulag...)
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To: JimRed

Perhaps actual measurement of a plasma plume from atmospheric gas blown away by solar wind?


35 posted on 05/11/2016 9:03:44 AM PDT by Ozark Tom
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To: rawcatslyentist
Funny, the pterodactyl couldn't have flown unless the density was about 4x what it is today.

Pterodactyls lived about 150 million years ago.

The article discusses the Earth's atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago.
36 posted on 05/11/2016 9:06:34 AM PDT by Colinsky
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To: MRadtke

“So is the Earth losing 50,000 tonnes per year of atmosphere?”

That is only an estimate for the amount of atmospheric mass being lost to space. The amount of atmospheric mass being lost and gained in exchanges of mass between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere are highly variable over geological time periods. As the Sun grows larger as it enters the Red Giant phase of its life cycle, the Earth will be stripped of all but a trace remnant of its atmosphere and hydrosphere by the strong Solar Winds. Then the Earth’s lithosphere will begin to vaporize.


37 posted on 05/11/2016 9:09:13 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
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To: Blueflag

“no pics or it didn’t happen ;-)”

Will a photograph of George Washington suffice?


38 posted on 05/11/2016 9:14:17 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
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To: WhiskeyX

We need more taxes to stop the loss of loss of 50,000 tonnes per year!


39 posted on 05/11/2016 10:15:50 AM PDT by minnesota_bound
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To: Resettozero

I do as well. We also know that carbon dioxide is 1.4 times as heavy as oxygen of a similar volume. The atmosphere in the pre-deluvian times was much lighter and more oxygen rich, permitting much greater growth of plant and animal life. It also permitted more rapid movement. It also permitted extraordinary creatures to survive when today we know their lung capacity could not sustain them. That, combined with the water vapor filtering out so the ultra violet rays, and people lived extraordinarily long lifespans as told in the Bible.


40 posted on 05/11/2016 3:45:20 PM PDT by SkyPilot ("I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6)
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