The lack of freshmen level reading comprehension skills in America is absolutely reprehensible.
This article should anyone actgal read and understand the contents is about the heat loss rate from the earth’s mantle and interior which also includes the outer and inner core. This is not in any way shape or form about surface temperatures or atmospheric heating or cooling. The paper is correct the continent’s being 60+ km thick are a better insulator than ocean crust at 6km or less thick with a few thousand meters at most of water.
Over Geological time as in hundreds of millions of years the earth will eventually cool to be a solid cold mass when the outer core cools enough to be solid it will no longer produce the earth magnetic field which also forms our magnetosphere. That magnetosphere is the only reason earth has a thick atmosphere that has not been stripped away by solar wind like Mars was millions of years ago. One our magnetosphere collapses it is only a matter of time before the sun strippes away our atmosphere and the earth then becomes a lifeless rock, the oceans will be stripped away as well. Mars once had oceans they were lost to space over millions of years earth has more mass so our planet took longer to cool.
” actgal “
Spelling not all that great either !
Ah, but the article leaves out the tidbit that the sun is getting hotter, supposedly enough to render Earth (at least at the surface) inhospitable to life in ~1.1 billion years.
https://usm.maine.edu/planet/sun-getting-hotter-if-so-why-will-earth-eventually-become-too-hot-life
(I do not know if that prediction takes a thinning atmosphere into effect. So far, at least from the standpoint of hospitality to life, once life arose on Earth, it’s generally been a near wash. SOME life, like humans during the last period of glaciation, or the dinosaurs (had to go with the bird option) has had tough times, but, enough of the planet has remained survivable that life on Earth has continued...)
However, a bigger point is that the largest factor in life surviving on Earth, in the long run, is not the Sun (until it goes Red Giant on us, and maybe not even then) or cooling of the Earth’s interior. The biggest factor is US. (Ok, God, too.) Retaining an atmosphere will one day be considered relatively easy.
If in a mere 1 million years we do not have the capability to do, literally, planetary engineering, we will have been the biggest disappointment Earth has ever seen.