Men’s Health
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New research shows that the Pacific hemisphere is losing heat faster than the African hemisphere.
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The heat comes from the melted interior of the Earth, which causes continental drift.
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The landmass retains more heat than the seabed surface, indicating a warmer Pacific from the past.
In a new study, scientists at the University of Oslo say that one side of the Earth’s interior is losing heat much faster than the other side – and the culprit is practically as old as time.
The research, published in Geophysical research charts, uses computer models from the past 400 million years to calculate how “isolated” each hemisphere was by continental mass, which is a key quality that retains heat instead of releasing it. The pattern dates back to Pangea.
The Earth has an incandescent liquid interior that warms the entire planet from the inside. It also rotates, generating gravity and the Earth’s magnetic field. This keeps our protective atmosphere close to the Earth’s surface.
In an extremely long time, this interior will continue to cool down until the Earth is more like Mars. The surprise in the new study is how the heat is unevenly dissipating, but the reason makes intuitive sense: parts of the Earth have been isolated by more land mass, creating a kind of thermal layer that retains heat.
This contrasts with the way 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,” write the study’s authors. Why is this the place of greatest loss? For that, we need a quick and dirty analysis of continental drift.
The Earth’s mantle is like a convection oven that feeds a mat. Every day, the surface of the seabed moves a little; the new seabed is born from the magma that erupts in the continental divide, while the old seabed is destroyed and melted under the existing continental landmass.
To study how the Earth’s inner heat behaves, scientists built a model that divides the Earth into African and Pacific hemispheres and then divides the entire surface of the Earth into a grid by half a degree of latitude and longitude.
Scientists have combined several previous models for things like the age of the seabed and continental positions over the past 400 million years. The team then calculated the numbers of how much heat each cell in the grid contains during its long life. This paved the way for calculating the overall cooling rate, where the researchers found that the Pacific side cooled much faster.
The seabed is much thinner than the bulky landmass, and the temperature inside the Earth is “turned off” by the huge volume of cold water that is above it. Think of the gigantic Pacific Ocean compared to landmasses on the opposite side of Africa, Europe and Asia – it makes sense that the heat will dissipate more quickly from the world’s largest seabed.
Previous research on this effect of the seabed dates back only 230 million years, which means that the new model, which dates back to 400 million years, almost doubles the period of time studied.
There is a surprising contradiction in the findings. The Pacific hemisphere has cooled by about 50 Kelvin more than the African hemisphere, but “consistently higher plate speeds in the Pacific hemisphere over the past 400 [million years]”Suggests the Pacific was much hotter at any given time.
Was it covered by landmass at some point in the distant past, keeping more heat inside? There are other possible explanations, but anyway, the high tectonic activity in the Pacific today points to a disparity in heat. The more melted the mantle, the more the plates can slide and hit each other.
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