Martian Fluvial Flows, Placid and Catastrophic

Despite the fact that, apart localized dust surfaces in summer, the surface of Mars has had average temperatures that never exceeded about minus 50 degrees C over its lifetime, it also has had some quite unexpected fluid systems. One of the longest river systems starts in several places at approximately 60 degrees south in the highlands, nominally one of the coldest spots on Mars, and drains into Argyre, thence to the Holden and Ladon Valles, then stops and apparently dropped massive amounts of ice in the Margaritifer Valles, which are at considerably lower altitude and just north of the equator. Why does a river start at one of the coldest places on Mars, and freeze out at one of the warmest? There is evidence of ice having been in the fluid, which means the fluid must have been water. (Water is extremely unusual in that the solid, ice, floats in the liquid.) These fluid systems flowed, although not necessarily continuously, for a period of about 300 million years, then stopped entirely, although there are other regions where fluid flows probably occurred later. To the northeast of Hellas (the deepest impact crater on Mars) the Dao and Harmakhis Valles change from prominent and sharp channels to diminished and muted flows at –5.8 k altitude that resemble terrestrial marine channels beyond river mouths.

So, how did the water melt? For the Dao and Harmakhis, the Hadriaca Patera (volcano) was active at the time, so some volcanic heat was probably available, but that would not apply to the systems starting in the southern highlands.

After a prolonged period in which nothing much happened, there were catastrophic flows that continued for up to 2000 km forming channels up to 200 km wide, which would require flows of approximately 100,000,000 cubic meters/sec. For most of those flows, there is no obvious source of heat. Only ice could provide the volume, but how could so much ice melt with no significant heat source, be held without re-freezing, then be released suddenly and explosively? There is no sign of significant volcanic activity, although minor activity would not be seen. Where would the water come from? Many of the catastrophic flows start from the Margaritifer Chaos, so the source of the water could reasonably be the earlier river flows.

There was plenty of volcanic activity about four billion years ago. Water and gases would be thrown into the atmosphere, and the water would ice/snow out predominantly in the coldest regions. That gets water to the southern highlands, and to the highlands east of Hellas. There may also be geologic deposits of water. The key now is the atmosphere. What was it? Most people say it was carbon dioxide and water, because that is what modern volcanoes on Earth give off, but the mechanism I suggested in my “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis” was the gases originally would be reduced, that is mainly methane and ammonia. The methane would provide some sort of greenhouse effect, but ammonia on contact with ice at minus 80 degrees C or above, dissolves in the ice and makes an ammonia/water solution. This, I propose, was the fluid. As the fluid goes north, winds and warmer temperatures would drive off some of the ammonia so oddly enough, as the fluid gets warmer, ice starts to freeze. Ammonia in the air will go and melt more snow. (This is not all that happens, but it should happen.)  Eventually, the ammonia has gone, and the water sinks into the ground where it freezes out into a massive buried ice sheet.

If so, we can now see where the catastrophic flows come from. We have the ice deposits where required. We now require at least fumaroles to be generated underneath the ice. The Margaritifer Chaos is within plausible distance of major volcanism, and of tectonic activity (near the mouth of the Valles Marineris system). Now, let us suppose the gases emerge. Methane immediately forms clathrates with the ice (enters the ice structure and sits there), because of the pressure. The ammonia dissolves ice and forms a small puddle below. This keeps going over time, but as it does, the amount of water increases and the amount of ice decreases. Eventually, there comes a point where there is insufficient ice to hold the methane, and pressure builds up until the whole system ruptures and the mass of fluid pours out. With the pressure gone, the remaining ice clathrates start breaking up explosively. Erosion is caused not only by the fluid, but by exploding ice.

The point then is, is there any evidence for this? The answer is, so far, no. However, if this mechanism is correct, there is more to the story. The methane will be oxidised in the atmosphere to carbon dioxide by solar radiation and water. Ammonia and carbon dioxide will combine and form ammonium carbonate, then urea. So if this is true, we expect to find buried where there had been water, deposits of urea, or whatever it converted to over three billion years. (Very slow chemical reactions are essentially unknown – chemists do not have the patience to do experiments over millions of years, let alone billions!) There is one further possibility. Certain metal ions complex with ammonia to form ammines, which dissolve in water or ammonia fluid. These would sink underground, and if the metal ions were there, so might be the remains of the ammines now. So we have to go to Mars and dig.

 

 

 

 

 

TV Programs: The Three Body Problem

Since many of you, including me, have watched the Netflix show, “The Three-Body Problem”, and since the journal Nature has published an article on it, I thought I should pass on their thoughts to those who do not read Nature, which is, after all, a rather specialized scientific journal, and add some of my own. Quoting from Nature “The story follows five young scientists who studied together at the University of Oxford, UK, as they grapple with mysterious deaths, particle-physics gone awry and aliens called the San-Ti who have their sights set on Earth.” Then science fiction story came from the Chinese writer Cixin Liu. I should add that I am only part-way through the series so my comments relate mainly to the earlier episodes.

the series, Nature  noted the research team all get along together reasonably well, and that is my experience in laboratories. You see each other every day, you probably have lunch together, so  yes you get on. But the program may get it slightly wrong in that while everyone may be working on a common problem, most of the time they are looking at individual aspects. I have not seen groups working together on one thing; it is simply not a way to make progress fast enough, but if someone gets stuck, they will ask the rest for ideas. The Nature article also makes a further point. There were five former PhD students and in the end only one or two are doing fundamental physics. That is common in other sciences. There simply is not enough paid positions for fundamental science.

The three body problem is a real physics problem. If you have three bodies with mutual gravitational interactions, the end result can be chaotic. In this program, we actually have the four-body problem because there are three stars with chaotic interactions and a planet. (In the book, there are more planets, but they get eliminated one by one.) However, in this case the system is Alpha Centauri, which has two stars of similar size to the sun. Their orbits are elliptical and their closest approach is as close as Saturn is to our sun. There is a third star, Proxima Centauri, which is a small red dwarf that is so far away from the other two it is irrelevant. Proxima has a planet that would have habitable temperatures, but the planet is close enough to the star that its “year” is about 15 of our days. It is tidally locked, so the same face is always pointed at the star, so it is unlikely to be attractive for habitation. There are no known planets around the two larger stars, but Alpha Centauri A could have a planet stable out as far as Mars. Stability requires the planet to be within what is called the Hill radius, which is where it is close enough to one star that the gravity from the other can be ignored. Three-star systems are quite common. Beta Centauri is also a three-star system with two stars about ten times the mass of the sun, and coming as close together as the distance to the outer asteroid belt. No habitable planets there. Anyway, while there are many three-star systems usually one is significantly further away from the other two, so it acts a bit like a two-star system plus a distant one. Nature probably solves the three-body problem by throwing one well away from the other two. The Netflix program seems to assume the planet of the aliens gets tossed around between the stars. It is extremely unlikely such a system could last long enough to generate life.

The TV program has the sun amplifying radio signals to Alpha Centauri. That is impossible. The sun could amplify a signal by gravitational lensing to another system in line with the Earth-Sun line at the time of signalling, but Alpha Centauri never qualifies. It is always visible in the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere. Another impossibility is the increase of a proton’s size by using additional dimensions. If we think of the three Cartesian dimensions as x,y,z then if we elongate y, then x remains unchanged, unless mass is transferred, for example, stretching a rubber band thins the rubber in the other dimensions. But you cannot generate more matter. Since we cannot see in additional dimensions, stretching the material into another dimension merely makes the object smaller in ours if matter is transferred. Further, it is impossible to convert the proton into a computer. Exploring new dimensions does not alter the parts that are in ours, and what goes on in the other dimensions is inaccessible to us.

The piece of science that annoys me is that it is proposed that it is possible to have near instantaneous communications using entangled photons. That is impossible for a number of reasons. The usual explanation for entangled photons is they violate Bell’s Inequality, and if they the pair of photons are non-local, and this was supposedly proven and was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics. In my opinion, it was not violated; the violation was in the maths used to work up the answers, which violated the conditions of deriving the inequality. This is explained, if anyone is interested, in the open access paper: Miller, I. J. (2023). Non-Violations in Bell’s Inequality. J Math Techniques Comput Math, 2(6), 209-210. To maintain the non-locality needed for instant communication you have to falsify that paper. But even apart from that, it is still impossible. The photons travel at light speed, so for instantaneous communication, they have to be generated exactly half-way between the two parties, say Bob and Alice. You need a continual stream of photons because who knows when someone wants to communicate? Then comes the stinger. What Bob does is he measures the spin of a sequence of photons, getting, say, uudududd. He now knows that provided Alice measures the correct partners, she will get the same sequence, but what does it mean? Bob merely measured what nature gave him. He did not code a message. Even if the system were non-local, which In my opinion it is not, there is no way to send messages faster than light speed. The fastest way is good old radio. The problem is Alpha Centauri is 4.367 light years away, so a message would take about 8.7 years to get a reply. However, don’t let me put you off the show. Forget these minor blemishes. I quite like the show, and I hope you will also like it if you watch.

Two-Dimensional Materials

Most readers will have heard of graphene, which is essentially a two-dimensional sheet of graphite. By two-dimensional I mean that perpendicular to the sheet there are no more carbon atoms. As is often the case, as soon as an unexpected advance is made, more examples follow. Silicene and germanene soon followed, but stanene, the structure from tin became elusive. However, that, and plumbene (the structure from lead) have been made. The latest claim from Kashiwaya et al (Nature Synthesis 2024https://doi.org/10.1038/s44160-024-00518-4) at Linköping University in Sweden is goldene. This is something of a triumph because generally it is difficult to produce two-dimensional sheets of metals because the electron distributions are very three-dimensional. In graphite the electrons are bound in orbitals fixed to carbon atoms that have simple lobes, and electrons in these can delocalize sideways but not axially. So even in solid graphite the strong binding is two dimensional, and there is weak binding normal to that, which is why graphite has little physical strength and the layers slip past each other, which is why graphite is good as a dry lubricant. But metals like gold can delocalize electrons in three dimensions, which is why metals have strength, and conduct electricity well.

It is also interesting that there is an element of controversy about this goldene. In 2022 researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi claimed to have produced goldene, but the Swedish scientists claim that the earlier material “probably contained multiple layers”. The new preparation does not, at least according to the Swedes. The method of making it was reasonably straightforward. What they did was to produce a silicon monolayer sandwiched between sheets of titanium carbide. They then added “gold atoms” which diffused into the structure and replaced the silicon, then they etched away the titanium carbide with an alkaline solution of potassium ferricyanide leaving only the two-dimensional layer of goldene. That looks extremely simple, but there may be further issues. Why did the gold atoms replace ALL the silicon? Could any be left behind? Are there any impurities left behind from the ferricyanide solution? And even if monolayers are made, why cannot they subsequently fold over and make nanoparticles? Or why can’t two monolayers combine?

All of which raises the question, is there any point to this, other than academic interest? The first response is that since we have no idea what such new materials will do, why not make them and find out. Sooner or later we shall find something useful. Sometimes we find things that in theory might be useful but for practical purposes probably is not. Although apparently even then we might be surprised. I have seen a colloidal dispersion of gold nanoparticles of a certain size, and they were coloured red. They could be used to dye fabrics, but the expense would be prohibitive. Notwithstanding that, some seem to have been made, clearly without understanding of what they were, to make certain red glass a long time back in history.

The fact that nanoparticles have a different colour shows they interact with light. Apparently gold nanoparticles are being investigated as possible catalysts, including as photocatalysts to split water. Goldene, if it did anything like that, would be useful because it has a greater surface area. Whether anything comes from this, however, is back to, we shall have to wait and see. However, an important point is if we don’t try to find new things, then we never shall and we shall be stuck where we are.

US Coastal Cities in Trouble, and They Will Not Be Alone

Many people have heard about sea-level rise, but not that many appreciate what it means for them. Of course, if you live in Denver it may not seem to matter much, but it mar=tters to those who live by the coast. In March, Nature published a paper (vol 627, 108 – 115) with the title: Disappearing cities on US Coasts. Certainly a catchy title. It turns out that global sea levels have risen by about 0.17 m over the past hundred years, and is currently rising at about 3.7 mm per annum, and even if we stopped emitting CO2 and other greenhouse emitters now, more rising is locked in. There is a further factor: coastal cities often experience land subsidence, which exacerbates the problem. So coastal cities might experience sea level rise, land subsidence, storm surges, salt-water intrusion, shoreline erosion, and inundation of adjacent land. More than 30% of US population reside in coastal cities, in part because trade needs ports and they, perforce, need to be on the coast. It is generally desirable for manufacturing to be near ports to get cheaper supplies and easier exporting. According to the Nature paper, US coastal cities generate an estimated annual revenue of US$3.8 trillion.

The effects are not evenly spread. Thus some beaches around Los Angeles are actually rising, but this effect can be isolated, thus San Diego is subsiding. The paper considered 32 cities in detail, which contained twenty-five million people with properties worth approximately US$12 trillion. They expect that by 2050 there will be exposed land of between 1334 – 1813 square kilometres, which will seriously affect between 176,000 – 518,000 people and 94,000 – 288,000 properties unless something is done.

The Atlantic coast has eleven of these cities, but the problems vary between cities, thus Miami has an average elevation of less than 2 metres above sea level, and is responsible for 41 – 49% of the exposed properties. The home value of exposed Atlantic cites is between US$ 14 – 64 billion, but this does not include critical infrastructure, such as airports, schools, hospitals, power plants, roads and railways. The Gulf coast has similar figures, although the cost is less. However, it is not clear how they accounted for New Orleans, parts of which are already below sea level but are protected by levees and other flood control structures. The Pacific coast is projected only to cause difficulties for  6,000 to 30,000 people and properties worth US$ 4.5 – 22 billion. This is in part due to less subsidence, and parts of Californian cities being built on higher land.

There is a sociological problem here too, in that the potentially exposed areas are more likely to be populated with economic minorities. The reason tends to be obvious: the risky land is cheaper, but so is minority land. The paper cites East Biloxi, following Hurricane Katrina and states that low-income and marginalized communities are still suffering, with broken untended infrastructure, high unemployment and homelessness, while the high-income communities received substantial federal aid. The weather-related incidents make inequality greater. The paper then advocates more active implementation of flood protection measures, but it is when we get around to that, we see the inadequacies of such academic studies. For example, they write: “it is critical to adopt a built-upon multifaceted strategy involving the implementation of adaptive measures, the regulation of subsidence and the implementation of stringent climate-change policies that keep carbon emissions low.” They are going to regulate subsidence?? How? “You naughty land. If you subside you’ll be dug up and go to jail.” Yeah, right.

More seriously, they discuss what needs to be done to prevent flooding in 2050, but why pick on that date? Why stop at 2050? Herein lies the real problem. By 2050, serious effects will be felt, but the cause of it, sea-level rising, does not stop at 2050. Basically, the causes will keep increasing, and from current trends, they may well be accelerating. Is there any point in constructing expensive means of keeping the sea out of cities in 2050, only to find out that by 2070 we have to double the protection, and by 2100 the concept of protection simply ceases to work. Certainly we have to adapt, but it is more important to deal with the overall problem now. And, of course, just because I picked on US cities does not mean the US is in a particularly bad position. It is just that the US has gathered more information and has a better idea of the problem for it.

Tarraforming Mars.

Recently, the question of terraforming Mars was raised by a post by The Planetary Society. Given the effort I put into the issue of why planets are like they are (in my ebook “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis”) I thought some comments could be in order. The Planetary Society article starts off with a proposal by Elon Musk to get more atmosphere onto Mars: explode nuclear bombs over the poles to liberate CO2. As a minor drawback, the North Pole is apparently mainly water ice. The article pointed out this would double the current atmospheric pressure, which is not exactly a great achievement. The procedure would provide enough water to cover the planet a few meters deep, which would produce possible oceans because Mars is far from flat. Apart from Hellas Planitia, most of the southern hemisphere, including Argyre Planitia, is higher than most of the northern hemisphere. The norther ocean might return, but it would very quickly freeze. There is more carbon dioxide locked in the soil, but even if that is mined over the whole planet, we could only get up to about 100 – 200 mbar. That is nowhere near enough to provide the greenhouse gas to warm the planet. Worse, if there were liquid water, it would dissolve carbon dioxide and the resultant carbonic acid would react with the powdered regolith to make carbonates. The carbon dioxide would quickly return to being locked away as rock.

The next problem is to make oxygen. Apparently, NASA has experimented with extremophile organisms that could, maybe, survive on Mars and produce carbon dioxide from oxygen. The problem with that is it would take an enormous amount of time. Basically, not practical. Making oxygen inside domes, however, is a different matter.

The next problem, according to the Planetary Society, is that the solar wind has stripped away most of the original atmosphere. Thus two thirds of the original argon, and ninety percent of the original molecular nitrogen have gone to space. A clue to what happened lies in those figures, and the clue has not been recognized generally. The mechanism for solar wind stripping has been elucidated by Vondrak (Vondrak, R. R., 1974. Creation of an artificial lunar atmosphere. Nature,248: 657-659), for creating an atmosphere on the moon. In view of that paper, the effects have been generally overstated. To escape to space, a molecule has to have an escape velocity in the direction of space. If it hits another molecule on the way, they share the momentum, and now neither has the escape velocity. The molecules then go on to hit other molecules, and further share their momentum until what has happened is the original energy has been converted to heat. Accordingly, the solar wind can only eject molecules that are in an approximate “toroidal” zone at the top of the atmosphere, and the plane of the torus is at right angles to the solar wind. Nitrogen, being lighter than argon, is more likely to go to the top of the atmosphere. Further, consider that ninety percent of the nitrogen has gone. That means that what is left represents ten percent. Currently, the atmosphere has about 6.3 mbars pressure and contains about 2.7% nitrogen. That means the original nitrogen pressure was about 0.17 mbar. A high fraction might have left, but the total amount originally present was trivial.

The next target for the article was the magnetic field. They suggest that a magnetic field generated at the first Lagrange point (the place where the Martian and solar gravitational fields cancel) would shield Mars. I suggested that in my novel “Red Gold” that was published well before NASA publicly suggested this, so I have NASA endorsement, sort of. However, the field should have a strength of 10,000 – 20,000 Gauss, and the best we can do now is 2,000 Gauss.

The article concludes that it would be impossible to terraform Mars with what we know now. I don’t entirely agree. The article raises the possibility of generating the atmosphere by bombing it with comets or asteroids, and point out it would take too long. If you could control moderate sized Kuiper-Belt objects, you could transport enough water and gas, including nitrogen, but you would also provide much of the carbon as carbon monoxide, which is rather toxic. Atmospheric oxidation would have to be promoted. So while possible, it would be such a long-term project that nobody would undertake it. If we send people to Mars, they will have to live their lives out in domes or underground caves. Meanwhile, if you want to know why the different planets are so different from each other, the ebook I mentioned above offers explanations. It should be available at most good ebook distributors.

Moonquakes!

As many will know there has recently been a fairly powerful earthquake to the East of Taiwan, and some will recall seeing a building that was about a third of the way towards falling over. Earthquakes are somewhat disturbing when you are in one, and more so sometimes when you are not in a very good place. Our news had one clip of one person in a swimming pool and the water was sloshing around quite vigorously, and while that would be scary, being in turbulent seawater would be worse. If, however, you are well away from the junction of tectonic plates, you should be safe from earthquakes. Except maybe in places where here has been a lot of mining or oil extraction. If you keep taking away stuff from underneath you, sometimes something underneath you drops. And there are further causes of moderate earthquakes, as New York citizens recently discovered. Apparently about 250 – 300 million years ago there was a tectonic plate running through the east coast of the US. It is dead now, but brittle rock that has been compressed can slip to find a less compressed or more evenly compressed state.

We are now going to send people back to the Moon, and you may wonder what that has to do with earthquakes. The answer is that 50 years ago Apollo astronauts left seismometers behind, and they have been listening for moonquakes. There are moonquakes, with the strongest ones near the South Pole, which is where Artemis III is heading in 2026, at least according to current plans. Why go to the South Pole? Because there are craters that contain water as ice; such craters never seeing the sun and with an absence of air on the Moon means that they had a temperature that is extremely low. Such moonquakes originate from the Moon cooling. As you know, matter expands on heating, and the corollary is it shrinks on cooling. The change of length may not be much for rock, but when said rock has a radius of 1734 km, a small change in length magnifies, and since it was originally hot enough to melt silicates, at least on the surface, and it would be hotter in the interior, it has had plenty of scope to shrink. This produces global stresses that produced thrust deformations in regions where sections of crust have to push past each other. Such deformations are called lobate thrust fault scarps, for the benefit of anyone who wants to say something that sounds very learned. They look like long curved wrinkles tens of metres high, and have been, and may still be, home to seismic activity.

The seismometers were put on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, and operated until 1977. They recorded 28 shallow moonquakes with magnitudes ranging from 1.5 to 5. That is not what you expect from solid rock, until you realize that when the radius contracts, the circumference has to shrink proportionately and where does the surplus rock go? There is also a big difference between moonquakes and earthquakes: moonquakes last longer. One magnitude 5 quake lasted several hours. Faults photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter focused on a small cluster of faults near the Lunar South Pole, including one that falls within the Artemis III candidate landing region. This fault may have produced a quake of strength up to 5.6, and would have produced moderate ground shaking for a distance of 40 km, and lesser shaking over a longer distance.

Which raises the question, where to land? Superficially, a desirable spot would be near the Shackleton Crater, but the slope is steeper here and the ground comprises regolith and loosely consolidated dry gravel. Shaking could send our intrepid explorers down into the crater proper. Landing sites would have to be carefully chosen, as would sites for bases because unlike on Earth, if your vessel falls over you will probably die fairly soon after. Falling into a major crater would be a very bad idea.

You can read all about this in the open access paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad1332

Two Million Research Papers Lost

One objective of scientific research is to publish the results, then anyone can get them and read them. At least that is what you might think. However, that noble thought does not always follow. Scientific papers that were printed on paper are not necessarily available if your local library does not have the copy. You may say that these are being archived electronically, but quite often all you can get is the abstract, and I confess that in my younger days I did not see the value of an abstract: it was something that had to be written, but you expected the paper to be read if anyone was interested. That worked then, but that was before a remarkable deluge of scientific work was published. In the first two thirds of the twentieth century there were not that many journals, and you could easily read through the indices of those in your field. If you read the conclusion, you would know whether you should read the lot. But now there is a plethora of such papers. Most are recorded electronically.

Papers/articles are given a digital object identifier (DOI), which consists of a string of numbers, letters and symbols. So far, so good, except, as one might expect from something that has simply “grown”, there are “teething problems”. DOIs are managed by a not-for-profit organization called Crossref, but seemingly is also managed by others. As reported in an article in Nature (News, March 4, 2024) more than two million research papers have been lost from the internet. Now that is careless. More than that, it is wasteful. If you add in the various costs for producing such a paper, such as salaries, rental, use of equipment, maintaining a library, maintenance, travel, it would be quite remarkable to get a paper for less than $10,000, and a figure of $100,000 is probably more likely. But taking the cheapest option we are at risk of having wasted $20 billion. That is more than careless.

Is it correct? First, the analysis used a random selection of up to 1000 works registered to each member organization. 28% of these works, corresponding to more than two million articles, assuming the samples were representative, did not appear in a major digital archive, despite having DOIs. A further 14 % were excluded because they were too recent or had some other problem.

People have assumed that an article in an electronic journal is there forever, but that appears not to be the case. More than 170 open access journals had disappeared from the internet between 2000 and 2019. In this context, small publishers are more at risk of failing to preserve articles than large ones because there is expense in archiving. That raises the question of what can be done about it? The problem is that there has been such a flood of material, and in fairness quite a bit of it would not be missed, but that raises the question, which bits? The one thing we do not need is some form of assessment by peer reviewers, because they tend to favour what they are familiar with. Accordingly, we need to preserve the lot, but how? One option might be similar to that of copyright. Each government records what people in its territory have done and ensure digital preservation. Of course, that assumes that digital preservation will last. Perhaps some “hard copy” is also required, effectively a back-up. What do you think?

Ocean Warming Hits New High

A recent paper (Cheng et al. Adv. Atmos.Sci., 2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-024-3378-5  produced an alarming piece of information: in 2023 the ocean heat content of the upper 2000 metres of the Earth’s ocean was 15 + 10 ZJ greater than the same in 2022. What that means is the Earth’s oceans absorbed 1.5 times 10^22 Joules more in one year. That is real global warming. The sea surface temperatures in 2023 averaged approximately 0.23 degrees higher that those of 2022, and if we consider only the second halves of the two years the temperature increased greater than 0.3 degrees C in 2023 than in 2022. You may recall the goal was to hold the temperatures overall to be no higher than 1.5 degrees C compared with those of 1850. As far as the sea is concerned, we somehow “achieved” 20% of that in six months! Now it is true that the El Niño system tends to produce net heating and La Niña usually produces cooling, but since 1960 the heating has usually exceeded the cooling. To put 2023 into perspective, the oceans absorbed 287 zettajoules of heat, which is equivalent to 8 Hiroshima atomic bombs every second. Of course, the oceans always absorb heat; it is just they are absorbing more recently

As to why this is important, we have to consider the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). What happens is warm water from the tropics that is saltier through evaporation, but of lower density because of its heat, flows north. As it cools, because it is saltier, it sinks and flows south along the ocean floor. The way it flows before it sinks is what warms the UK and northern Europe. However, if the warmer water is the melting of Arctic ice, which would drive large amounts of fresh water inro the North Atlantic which would dilute the saltier water, when it would no longer sink. Now the whole ocean circulation comes to a halt. Could that happen? What is less than clear is how much it depends on the rate of addition of fresh water. If it did happen, Europe would become very much cooler, and the Southern hemisphere would become quite a bit warmer, which would lead to more pressure on the Antarctic ice sheets.

One of the more interesting points is that once this overturn starts, models indicate that it keeps going, even if the provision of more fresh water falls away. Before long, London would cool by 10 degrees Centigrade, Bergen would drop 15 degrees, while the Amazon region would see its wet and dry seasons flip, which should disrupt its ecosystem, to say nothing of local agriculture. Coastal Europe would have a climate similar to Kerguelen, which, in my novel Puppeteer, I had great amusement buy having a snowstorm in the middle of summer!

However, the AMOC is not the only problem. If the seas are warming, marine life becomes strained, and this strain is further hurt by our overfishing and ocean acidification. The water expands, leading to small amounts of sea level rise, although this is dwarfed compared with what happens when the ice sheets melt. Oxygen levels in the water drop, which strains fish populations, which have to migrate to new environments. Ocean acidification leads to shellfish that depend on aragonite to make their shells cannot do so. The life forms that eat shellfish go hungry. Corals die, and on land we get severe rainfall, droughts, and very destructive storms. Life has adapted to this sort of thing in the past, but never at the current rate of change.

Has Geoengineering a role in Climate Change?

In a previous post I looked at the effect of tree-planting to help counter climate change. This time I shall look at geoengineering. The United Nations Environmental Assembly considered a resolution on solar radiation modification, which called for the convening of an expert group to examine the benefits and risks. The resolution was withdrawn because the non-experts could not agree on whether to form the panel. Well, that was a huge achievement! It is claimed that research has identified potential risks, such as unpredictable effects on weather, biodiversity loss, undermining food security, and infringement of human rights across generations by passing on huge risks to generations that will follow us. In short, the risks that something will happen are the same as what we know will happen now. These changes are locked in, and are not risks. However, not all proposals are sensible.

Proposals include injecting millions of tonnes of aerosols into the stratosphere. The critics say this would alter global winds and rainfall patterns, leading to more drought and cyclones, exacerbate acid rainfall and slow ozone recovery. That would depend on what is done. It is not necessary to fire acidic material or ozone depleting material up there. The one criticism that is reasonable is that this expensive operation would have to be carried out continuously. Missing in action was a proposal to insert potential “dust” particles into aero-jet engines to make long-lasting contrails. A possibility would be something like diethyl zinc. Zinc oxide should remain volatile within the engine. There may be other problems, such as fuel storage but at least consider it.

An alternative is to make low-level clouds brighter by spraying microscopic seawater droplets into the air. This was rejected because there is no peer-reviewed evidence that it would work. Given nobody is trying, and looking at the attitude of potential reviewers, that rejection is ridiculous. As an example of “expert opinion”, one comment was, “Even if it worked, it is hardly environmentally benign.” That is a fairly good sign such a project would be rejected. On the other hand, not doing it makes sense: it would also be too expensive, so it would never happen.

One project was to spread tiny glass spheres over large areas of sea ice to brighten the surface. This failed – they sped up the loss of sea ice. A little thought on the physics would have indicated the spheres would refract the light and concentrate it in spots and enhance absorption when the sun was at an angle, which it usually is where there is sea ice. Another proposal was to spray the ocean with microbubbles or foam. If you cannot see what is wrong with that proposal, you are not thinking clearly.

So what do they think is the answer? Apparently 500 scientists signed an open letter calling for non-use of solar geoengineering, and argue that model studies suffer from uncertainties. Their answer to the problem is to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently they have not noticed that we have made no progress on that at all, and we are accelerating in in the wrong direction.

Can geoengineering do any good? In my opinion, possibly. The best option I can think of is to fertilize the cooler oceans with dust, or better, a gel, containing iron oxide. The advantage of the gel is it does not sink. The result is a bloom of microalgae. This has been shown to work, but was rejected because the algae did not sink to the bottom. One could harvest them, for biofuels. In answer to the objection that we don’t know how to harvest them, then why not research the possibility? There must be some way. However, the important point is that the light absorbed by photosynthesis does not create heat – the energy is locked up as chemical energy. Further, if you seed the right microalgae you provide feed for animals and hence have more carbon locked up as life forms and more food for humans.

What seems to have happened here is that the concept started with activity and not thought. The obvious was proposed to get research funding, which probably shut out those proposals that came later and had more thought. As for the self-styled “experts”, the proposal to pass the buck to someone else is unfortunately only too familiar. And no, I do not think geoengineering is the answer. There is no single answer, although a massive expansion of nuclear generation in molten salt reactors comes the closest to one.

What Would Technological Aliens Look Like

This post is inspired by a contact with a friend on social media. Meeting with aliens is a popular trope with television programs, and the aliens always look humanoid, but with various lumps etc added. Part of the reason for this, of course, is we have to have actors playing them, and actors are, well, human, so all that can really be done is to add the lumps and bumps. The actors can’t grow more legs! But how valid is this? For the purposes of this post, I shall assume the aliens are organic. Strictly speaking, at a certain level of development that could insert themselves into machines, like the Daleks on Doctor Who. At that point they could be any shape or form, although almost certainly better designed than a Dalek. However, they will have originated from an organic form and that will be what I am considering. The following also focuses on what is essential. Whether they have hair, feathers, scales or something else is irrelevant to the essentials.

The biggest single constraint is the alien has to be at the end of a long chain of evolution, starting with a single-cell entity that will be in water. There is an important point about evolution and that is every feature has a cost, and the evolving organism can only pay so much. If too much effort goes into something not immediately useful, that evolutionary strand will be eaten out of existence. Accordingly, if it has no immediate purpose, evolution tends to get rid of it. One can see the process occurring in a tyrannosaur’s “arms and hands”. It did not need to grasp prey, so as evolution proceeded, those with smaller arms had invested their development in something else, like the ability to replaced teeth. They survived more often to breed. So let us consider that constraint further.

Obviously, an entity that will be technological has to get out of the water, and at that point it will either have a skeleton or it will not. A skeleton has the advantages of being better able to carry loads and run faster. What came out of the oceans here were insects, things like slugs and snails, and amphibians. Insects cannot make it because they stay too small, and non-skeletal organisms tend to be small so there is more room to hide. One feature of evolution is that animals either eat or be eaten. Either way, the race is on to be faster in order to either catch prey or to escape the predator. There is no point in saying a super-intelligent octopus could evade this constraint. It won’t start that way, and the first thing predators do is evolve good teeth and strong jaws. Even in the sea, octopuses basically evade predators by hiding. That strategy does not favour getting large, and if it did accidentally get large, a predator would develop the means of eating it.

While in the sea it will be streamlined and fish shaped. When it crawls out it will use fins as legs. So, how many legs? Four is probably optimal for speed. Six, in my opinion, get in each other’s way, and we also ask why were that many fins? Six also needs more brain control, which means there is less available for other things. What does six legs do that four cannot for a large animal? With the four legs is a body and a head. The head will preferably develop a neck so that it can more easily see what is around. If it cannot do that, some predator will jump on its back and eat it. It will probably retain its tail, but not necessarily.

Now, to develop technology, it has to be able to distinguish small differences in distance, so it will have two eyes in the front of its head. It will also have a neck that can turn the eyes around, and it may have sensitive ears. It will most likely be something like our size. If it is too small, its brain does not have sufficient capacity; if it is much bigger it will spend much more of its evolutionary “capital” on devising a means of staying alive. It will walk on two legs because to develop technology it has to use hands most of the time, and it only had four limbs. Two will be arms. It must also have opposable thumbs so it can grasp things.

That raises the question, why does it develop intelligence? It may be an ideal long-term solution but evolution cannot plan. The humans learned to walk on two legs because they came down to the savannah, but they would then be prey. They learned to fend off predators with sticks and stones, but that life would be fairly brutal and short for a while. The reason intelligence developed was that they were ill-equipped for their new environment, but they could survive, just. The smarter ones would be the survivors, and hence intelligence developed.

Could something else have developed on Earth? The nearest possibility was probably the troodon. This was a raptor that was not especially suited as a carnivore, it appeared to have an opposable thumb, and it appeared to be developing a larger brain when unfortunately for it, the Cretaceous period came to a sudden end. In my novel Ranh I had an alien race of evolved raptors. If nothing else, it was fun writing about how a raptor would view its and our societies. Particularly when they learned that the planet of creation was over-run with mammals.

No Longer Exclusive to Amazon

Red Gold  is no longer exclusive to Amazon, and can be found at major ebook outlets in addition to Amazon. If you found my posts on settling on Mars interesting, you might enjoy the novel that started my specific interest in Mars. It gives more details about how a settler would have to cope with Mars, an account of what was known about the Hellas basin in the early 1990s, and the anatomy of a type of fraud that was prevalent around the 1980s crash.