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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 20, 2012 - 12:54pm PT
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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.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Nov 20, 2012 - 01:13pm PT
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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
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 20, 2012 - 01:14pm PT
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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.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Nov 20, 2012 - 01:27pm PT
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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
Peace
Karl
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 20, 2012 - 01:36pm PT
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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.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 20, 2012 - 01:44pm PT
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Ed,
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.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 20, 2012 - 02:00pm PT
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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:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_isotope_ratio_cycle
Read the wiki link. It is pretty easy to understand after you read a few pages. Nothing too complicated.
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Gary
Social climber
Right outside of Delacroix
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Nov 20, 2012 - 03:19pm PT
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Ed, Base104, thanks for your posts in this thread. It makes my lunch break a little more interesting.
I have no idea of what the Chief DOES like.
He likes yanking people's chains on the Internets. Y'all should have figured that out by now.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 20, 2012 - 05:48pm PT
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It would be amazing if John McPhee were to do a book on climate, and human-caused climate change and its effects, but he doesn't seem to be writing as much now as formerly. He could probably even explain the subject to some of the true believer deniers.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 20, 2012 - 07:15pm PT
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Alas, but McPhee is getting up there in age. He had an amazing skill at taking a complicated topic and communicating it perfectly.
Hell, I have been a geologist for 30 years and still learned things from his geology books.
The only geology book you need to read, for the casual reader, is Annals Of The Former World. He probably put over a decade into that one book.
I still talk a lot with his son in law. They take regular trips to visit him at his home in Princeton.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Nov 21, 2012 - 11:48am PT
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Here's a cool-sounding, big-picture idea -- new to me at least -- from the Nov 13 issue of EOS (emphasis added).
Weighing the ocean with a single mooring
Scientists propose that it would be possible to measure changes in ocean mass with a single moored sensor. Changes in ocean mass, which can be caused by added water from melting ice sheets, are an important part of global sea level changes, which can also result from thermal expansion.
Many estimates of changes in ocean mass currently rely on satellite-based measurements of the regional gravitational field, which are used to calculate mass. However, satellites have limited spatial resolution and have difficulty distinguishing mass on land from ocean mass near coasts. They also have problems measuring the very largest scales, making interpretation difficult.
Hughes et al. combined ocean and Earth models to show that while changes in ocean bottom pressure, and thus ocean mass, are not uniform over the ocean, it is possible to find a location, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where a single ocean bottom pressure recorder could be used to determine total ocean mass changes with accuracy that would be better than satellite data. They used this method to measure the annual cycle of ocean mass.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012EO460007.shtml
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
The Illuminati -- S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Division
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Nov 22, 2012 - 01:54am PT
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Thank you Ed, Base and Chiloe!
I am learning a lot and I am sure others are, even if we are not as vocal as "the distraction." Just ignore the distraction and carry on!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 22, 2012 - 02:19am PT
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Chief: Not into paying for things that are someone else's useless money making scheming endeavors.
Too late, you already did a career in the military across a number of unnecessary money-making wars.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 22, 2012 - 01:50pm PT
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That's a good one, Healje.
Lately this thread has been kind of like the congressional town hall meetings a few years ago. The Tea Party was organized and trained to just start screaming about killing Grandma or something.
They might have a point, but because they are screaming and not listening, there is no possible discussion of ideas.
Global Warming is hardly a settled issue. Yes, the Earth is warming. Yes, it appears to correlate to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes, that CO2 was put there by humans burning everything from cow chips to jet fuel.
What is not well known is exactly how bad it will be. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and how that vapor responds to warming is a huge question being worked on. So it really isn't a matter of if. It is a matter of how much. Laymen take this uncertainty and misuse it, saying that the science isn't settled. That is totally inacurate. The question is not really if it is caused by humans, it is what the result will look like in fifty or 100 or 500 years into the future.
Atmospheric Physics is not my area of expertise. Not even close. What I do know is paleoclimate and Earth history. The best source for this information is in sedimentary rocks. The sedimentary record shows an unending sequence of high and low stands of sea level. High stands occurred during warm times when continental ice sheets melt, and low stands occur during cold times when a lot of water is tied up in ice.
So Eustatic (global) sea level change appears to be entirely climate driven. There is no other known mechanism to raise and lower sea level by 100 to 200 feet than gain and loss of ice stored on continental land masses.
The rock record is absolutely filled with these cycles, and that is my job, to sort that out. If you read my post on the Mississippi Delta lobe sequences, then lithify those sequences for 200 million years and bury them beneath 10,000 feet of younger rocks and younger sequences, then you see my job. I sort all of that out. Most people think of sedimentary stratigraphy as a simple layered cake. The bottom layer is obviously the oldest, and the top layer is the youngest. Some places are actually that simple, but as a rule they are not.
I can look at a 20 foot carbonate reef sequence on the northern shelf of the Anadarko Basin, follow it south where it falls off of the shelf and changes to a clastic (shale and sandstone) environment, with shoreface bars and backstepping sequences reworked by transgression, and the whole thing gets pretty damn complicated.
Back to climate sequences. We know absolutely without a doubt that on its own, the Earth's climate is incredibly cyclic. Every sedimentary rock that I have worked is cyclic, and since depositional environments are one of my main specialties, it isn't that hard to determine the paleo environment that was in place when the rocks were deposited.
Basically the sedimentary rock record is like a fantastic book. If you know how to read it, it is a lot of fun. Don't think that I do this on my own, though. At any given time there are probably a dozen other geologists in the company working on the same problem at the same time, not to mention the other dozen companies who are also working it.
There is a lot of ship jumping right now. A hot geologist from one company will get a fat offer from another company and then go there taking his noggin full of information over to that company. So in the end, despite all of this proprietary hush hush, the framework of the play becomes well known.
I just finished a consulting contract for Chesapeake Energy, who drills more onshore U.S. wells than any other company. Since natural gas prices have cratered, and they are basically a natural gas company, they are really hurting right now. I was brought in to work a set of carbonate sequences in a hot play. Half of the work was just bringing my already worked data and zapping it into their server, but I worked with a wonderful multi-disciplinary team of very smart people.
The gist of all this back slapping is that the sedimentary record has been pretty well scoured. A lot is known about every period in Earth's history back to about the Cambrian. The rocks I work are pretty much Devonian through Permian, although the Gulf of Mexico rocks are far younger. They are almost baby rocks of Tertiary and younger age. I work pre-dinosaur era rocks and the Gulf of Mexico is a lot of Miocene and Oligocene stuff when there were already little midget horses running around.
Anyway, depositional environment is one of the most important questions to ask when looking at something. Right now I am working a Pennsylvanian fluvial/delta complex. The pay zone is only 10-20 feet thick. It is pretty shallow, about 4000 feet deep, but I can follow this delta sequence down into the deep Arkoma and Anadarko basins. As the deltas prograded into the deep basin, which was dropping as this sequence of rocks were deposited, what is a 200 foot thick sequence of five overlayed deltas becomes a 5000 foot sequence of thirty or more deltas. That is what sequence stratigraphy is. Just go to wiki and read this page for a good basic explanation of sequence stratigraphy, which is actually a fairly new way of sorting out sedimentary sequences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_stratigraphy
People think that oil is found in caves, but it is found in normal old sandstones and limestones. The Wingate at Indian Creek would be a fantastic reservoir rock. It is thick (over 100 feet), it is very porous (probably 20-25% pore space), and it obviously has great permeability. To measure permeability I need a core sample to take back to the lab, but I have worked enough sandstones to say that it is almost certainly over 100 millidarcies. 10 milldarcies are usually good enough, but if the permeability gets too low you need to frack it.
Rivers and delta distributaries are places where lots of nice sandstone accumulate, so usually I work those. The Wingate is great to look at, but it is at the surface eroding away, sending its little sand grains downstream to be deposited again as another sandstone. Sand grains are quartz for our purposes, and when a granitic rock weathers, the feldspars and micas and more mafic minerals disolve into clay minerals. Quartz is the same thing as glass, and it is hard and nigh immune to chemical weathering. Quartz grains can be recycled over and over into different sandstones over hundreds of millions of years, which is what is happening to that wonderful loose sand at the base of the routes at Indian Creek.
Preservation is most likely around sea level, so most ancient depositional environments are deltas, bars, beaches, etc. I can map a delta distributary system for a hundred miles, even though it is a mile or two deep and lies beneath a wheatfield.
There are buried mountain ranges, massive fault systems, big canyon scours in an ancient surface from a river system. You name it. As you drive across the plains you are driving across a lot of history.
So stuff like paleoclimate drives the distrubution of a depositional environments. The fossil record is also a reasonably direct picture of the environment and climate at the time of deposition.
All kinds of weird things have been figured out.
The driver of climate cycles isn't well understood. We know that the Earth's inclination from the ecliptic plays a part. Over time the Earth's axis changes due to cycles of precession and nutation. This certainly would affect climate and has been considered as one of the possible main drivers of natural cycles in paleoclimate. As it sits right now, I'm not aware of any good explanation of the main driver in the cycles.
I mentioned previously that you can measure the paleomagnetic signature of a rock by carefully taking small core plugs from outcrops and then measuring their signature in the lab. Most rocks have at least a small amount of minerals with magnetic susceptibility, so you can look at a rock and tell its latitude when it was deposited. That is how you can follow the wander of continents and subcontinents and collisions, rifts, and the whole shebang of where a rock was in the past. So if you see a rock that was deposited in a temperate zone that has evidence of glaciation, then you know it was a really cold period. By now much of the planet has been studied.
Look at Mars. Why does it have only a token atmosphere and no water left?
First is that it has no magnetic field like we have. The planet is much smaller in volume and cooled off in a billion years or so. When the magnetic field went, then the atmosphere was scavenged by the solar wind. Low atmospheric pressures are too low for liquid water to survive and the water vapor was scavenged away as well.
Now this is the cool part: The most famous martian meteorite, ALH84001, is about 4 billion years old, and has a paleomag signature about as strong as what the Earth has right now. So we know that conditions in the Martian past were much different than what we see today: a bunch of dried up riverbeds covered with craters and yada yada.
Geoscience is a massive topic. Give me one grain of sand and I can tell you a story. If I can't do it, I'll find somebody who can.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 22, 2012 - 07:52pm PT
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Although coastal BC is rather exposed to earthquakes, with one of magnitude 9 or greater likely in the next 100 - 200 years.
As for Mars, what about the hypothesis that much of its water simply migrated underground, perhaps together with any unicellular life that had managed to get started before things got too cold and dry?
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Nov 22, 2012 - 07:57pm PT
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I can't believe this Global Warming sh#t is still selling. Climate Change now?
Sounds like people trying to keep their day-jobs!
Stop with the alarmist bullshit already!!! It's f*#king climate!
And yeah, I hear we're in a new solar cycle.....wooooooo, scary!!!
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 22, 2012 - 08:06pm PT
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I diagnose bluering as having sporadic rantitis, and prescribe a soothing dose of turkey, mashed spuds and cranberry sauce for him. Plus a tickle fight with John.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Nov 22, 2012 - 08:09pm PT
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I'm having steak tonight, Anders. Had the turkey-stuff with the wife's parents last weekend.
Steak, garlic-bead, salad...dude, that kicks ass on that T-day crap!!!
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Nov 22, 2012 - 08:12pm PT
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Stand down everybody
Bluering is on it
Yeah, well, stupid Bluering had it right on solar cycles before others here...
Expect 10 years of cooling.
Bluey out~~~
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Nov 22, 2012 - 08:16pm PT
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hey base ,great post[s].geology,meteorology,with a bit astrology ,always been interested.i think you write the big picture yourself. chesapeake energy,i believe they are into fracking here on the allegheny plateau,with ngas prices tanking,whats their angle?gas wells[storage] leak in on our area,because of abundance,yet prices to consumers are rising.are you privy to the propritary chem mix they use to extract?are you a proponent of fracking?just curious.happy thanksgiving. it is 62 here today,i know its not scientific,but me and friends always skied this day in the 80s and 90s,and i mean backcountry skiing.
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