Of men’s health
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New research shows that the Pacific hemisphere loses heat faster than the African hemisphere.
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The heat comes from the Earth’s molten interior, causing continental drift.
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Land mass captures more heat than the seabed, indicating a warmer Pacific of the past.
In a new study, scientists from the University of Oslo say that one side of the earth’s interior loses heat much faster than the other side – and the culprit is almost as old as time.
The research, published in Geophysical research letters, uses computer models from the last 400 million years to calculate how “isolated” each hemisphere was by continental mass, which is an important property that keeps heat inside instead of releasing it. The pattern goes all the way back to Pangea.
The earth has a red hot liquid inside that heats the entire planet from within. It also rotates and generates both the gravitational pull and the magnetic field of the earth. It keeps our protective atmosphere close to the earth’s surface.
Over the extremely long term, this interior will cool down until the earth is more like Mars. The surprise in the new study is how unevenly the heat is distributed, but the reason intuitively makes sense: Parts of the earth have been isolated by more land mass and create something of a Thermos layer that traps heat.
This contrasts with how the earth loses most of its heat: “The earth’s thermal evolution is largely controlled by the rate of heat loss through the oceanic lithosphere,” the study’s authors write. Why is this the biggest loss? For that, we need a fast and dirty passage of continental drift.
The earth’s mantle is like a convection furnace that drives the treadmill. Every day the surface of the seabed moves a little bit; new seabed is born from the magma that erupts at the continental gorge, while the old seabed is crushed and melted beneath the existing continental land masses.
To study how the earth’s heat acts, scientists have built a model that divides the earth into the African and Pacific hemispheres and then divides the entire earth’s surface into a grid by the latitude and longitude of half a degree.
Over the past 400 million years, scientists have combined several models for things like seabed age and continental positions. After that, the team knocked down the numbers for how much heat each grid cell contained over its long life. This paved the way for calculating the cooling rate, where the researchers found that the Pacific side cooled much faster.
The seabed is much thinner than the voluminous land mass, and the temperature inside the earth is extinguished by the enormous amount of cold water that is above it. Think of the huge Pacific Ocean compared to the opposite land masses of Africa, Europe and Asia – it is logical that heat spreads faster from the largest seabed in the world.
Previous research on this seabed effect has gone back only 230 million years, which means that the new model, which goes back 400 million years, almost doubles the time frame studied.
There is a surprising contradiction in the findings. The Pacific Hemisphere has cooled about 50 Kelvin more than the African Hemisphere, but the “constant higher velocities of the Pacific Ocean over the past 400 [million years]Imagine the Pacific Ocean wash much warmer at some point.
Was it at some point in the distant past covered by land mass, which held more heat inside? There are other possible explanations, but anyway, the high tectonic activity of the Pacific Ocean today indicates a heat difference. The more the mantle melts, the more the plates can slide together.
Now look at this:
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