One side of the earth is quickly getting colder than the other

From Men’s Health

• New research shows that the Pacific hemisphere loses heat faster than the African hemisphere.

• The heat comes from the Earth’s molten interior, causing the continents to drift.

• The landmass traps more heat than the seabed surface, indicating a warmer Pacific of the past.

In a new study, scientists at the University of Oslo say one side of the Earth’s interior is losing heat much faster than the other – and the culprit is practically as old as time.

The research, published in Geophysical research letters, uses computer models from the past 400 million years to calculate how “isolated” each hemisphere was by land mass, which is a key quality that holds heat inside instead of releasing it. The model dates back to Pangea.

The Earth has a hot red liquid interior that warms the entire planet from within. It also spins, generating both gravity and the Earth’s magnetic field. This keeps our protective atmosphere close to the surface of the Earth.

In the very long term, this interior will continue to cool until the Earth looks more like Mars. The surprise in the new study is how unevenly heat dissipates, but the reason makes intuitive sense: Parts of the Earth have been isolated by more landmass, creating a sort of thermos layer that traps the heat.

This contrasts with how the Earth loses most of its heat: “The thermal evolution of the Earth is largely controlled by the rate of heat loss through the oceanic lithosphere,” write the study’s authors. Why is this the site of the greatest loss? For that, we need a quick and dirty continental drift analysis.

The earth’s mantle is like a convection oven that powers a conveyor belt. Every day, the surface of the seabed moves a little bit; a new seabed is born from the magma that erupts at the continental divide, while the old seabed is shattered and melted under the existing landmass.

To study the behavior of the Earth’s internal heat, scientists built a model that divides the Earth into African and Pacific hemispheres, then divides the entire surface of the Earth into a grid of half degrees of latitude and longitude.

The story continues

Scientists have combined several previous models for things like the age of the seabed and continental positions over the past 400 million years. Next, the team calculated the amount of heat contained in each cell of the grid over its long lifespan. This paved the way for the calculation of the global cooling rate, where the researchers found that the Pacific side cooled much faster.

The seabed is much thinner than the bulky land mass, and the temperature of the Earth’s interior is “turned off” by the enormous volume of cold water above it. Think of the gigantic Pacific Ocean compared to land masses across Africa, Europe, and Asia – it makes sense for heat to dissipate faster from the world’s largest seabed.

Previous research into this seabed effect was only 230 million years old, meaning the new model, which dates back 400 million years, nearly doubles the time under study.

There is a surprising contradiction in the results. The Pacific hemisphere has cooled about 50 Kelvin more than the African hemisphere, but the “consistently higher plate velocities of the Pacific hemisphere over the past 400 years [million years]”Suggest the Pacific was much hotter at one point.

Was it covered by land mass at some point in the distant past, keeping more heat inside? There are other possible explanations, but in any case, the strong tectonic activity of the Pacific today indicates a thermal disparity. The more fondant the coat, the more the plates can slide and snap together.

🎥 Now watch this:

You might also like