What does 10 TRILLION gallons of water even equate to?
That's one weather prediction for southern California in the next week. Gary Haupt
Forum Discussion
A lot of grossly misinformed people here. I take it as a sad sign of the lack of science education in the United States.
I see someone mention over 4.5 billion years bla, bla, bla. Over that 4.5 billion years the Earth has gone through a lot of changes.
- No oxygen to speak of for the first 1 billion years until stromatolites formed and produced enough oxygen to oxidize all the iron in the ocean. Then the great oxygenation event occurred as the stromatolites continued to produce oxygen. That is what produced the oxygen in the atmosphere.
- There were no continents in the early earth and no oceans. Just a hot lava ball. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to research how continents and the oceans formed.
- Due to continental drift and subduction zones all ocean floor gets formed and subducted every 200 million years. 200 million years ago all continents were part of one super-continent, Pangea. Of course the interior of that continent was dry and desert.
The continents have only been in their present configuration about 50 million years.
Talking about 4.5 billion years of change is ridiculous when the last 50 million are the most relevant.
Scientists know for a fact that CO2 levels have not been this high, over 400 ppm, for all the 800,000 years of ice core samples that are available,
Here's a good read, about the rift zone that opened in mid-US but stopped:
http://www.geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/rift_zone.html
I see someone mention over 4.5 billion years bla, bla, bla. Over that 4.5 billion years the Earth has gone through a lot of changes.
- No oxygen to speak of for the first 1 billion years until stromatolites formed and produced enough oxygen to oxidize all the iron in the ocean. Then the great oxygenation event occurred as the stromatolites continued to produce oxygen. That is what produced the oxygen in the atmosphere.
- There were no continents in the early earth and no oceans. Just a hot lava ball. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to research how continents and the oceans formed.
- Due to continental drift and subduction zones all ocean floor gets formed and subducted every 200 million years. 200 million years ago all continents were part of one super-continent, Pangea. Of course the interior of that continent was dry and desert.
The continents have only been in their present configuration about 50 million years.
Talking about 4.5 billion years of change is ridiculous when the last 50 million are the most relevant.
Scientists know for a fact that CO2 levels have not been this high, over 400 ppm, for all the 800,000 years of ice core samples that are available,
Here's a good read, about the rift zone that opened in mid-US but stopped:
http://www.geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/rift_zone.html
