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>Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics,
by macspoofing 8y ago
>Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics, I think you might be delaying, amplifying, and shifting the focus of the earthquakes.
I cannot imagine that we are anywhere close to technologically capable of having even a miniscule impact on plate tectonics.
- Bud 8y agoThat's similar to what the fracking advocates said before they started causing earthquakes.
- macspoofing 8y agoCausing earthquakes is easy (I lived close to a mine, and earthquakes happened). Affecting plate tectonics ... I feel like that is something entirely different.
- mchannon 8y agoInteresting. Trade “the planet’s climate” for “plate tectonics” and you’ll find a lot of like-minded Americans, particularly in Congress.
- woodandsteel 8y agoThe Earth's crust has something like a million times the mass of its atmosphere.
- mchannon 8y agoActually, TIL (a google search revealed) it's only 5 times more massive.
- philipkglass 8y agoThat is not correct either. Earth's crust: 2.77 * 10^22 kg http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFM.V33A1161P http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFM.V33A1161P Earth's atmosphere: 5.15 * 10^18 kg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_and_mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_an... The crust is about five thousand times more massive.
- mchannon 8y agoThe factor of 1000 difference is what you get when you accidentally forget to convert between kg and tonnes. 5000 it is.
- Const-me 8y agoThe mass of the atmosphere is same as mass of 10m layer of water (because they both create 1 atm hydrostatic pressure). Obviously, the crust is much thicker than 10m, also much denser than 1000kg/m^3.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]