Models show that the Earth’s heat loss is greatest on one side of the planet

A team of researchers at the University of Oslo found evidence that shows that the loss of heat from Earth is more pronounced on one side of the planet than on the other. In his article published in the magazine Geophysical research charts, the group describes the creation of models that represent the loss of heat from the Earth in the last 400 million years and what they showed.

Previous research has shown that heat inside the Earth reaches the surface, where it dissipates. The heat inside the Earth arises from the degradation of radioactive elements and also from the collisions that occurred between asteroids that led to the creation of the planet. In this new effort, the researchers found that the heat inside the planet does not escape uniformly across the surface.

Previous research efforts that have examined Earth’s heat loss have only been able to go back in time by approximately 240 million years. In this new effort, researchers were able to create models that show the Earth’s geography going back 400 million years ago. Over time, the continents have changed dramatically, from supercontinents to the arrangement that exists today. To make their model, the researchers started by calculating how much heat was lost during the study period. They found that it was approximately 149 Kelvin per billion years of cooling. They also added data that describes how much heat is able to move across different types of surface areas and data that describes the movement of continents. Heat is able to move much more efficiently through the crust below the oceans, they note, than through the crust below the continents.

The model showed that more heat was escaping from parts of the planet that were covered by large oceans, specifically the Pacific Ocean. They found that if they cut the planet in half at the 60-degree longitude line, the half of the planet that consists mainly of the Pacific Ocean allowed much more heat to escape than the hemisphere that includes Africa, Europe and Asia. Calculations have shown that the Pacific hemisphere has cooled by approximately 50 degrees more than the African hemisphere in the past 400 million years.

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