Geophysics Quotes

Lastly, we need to know the strength of gravity on Dagobah. Here, I figure I’m stuck, because while sci-fi fans are obsessive, it’s not like there’s gonna be a catalog of minor geophysical characteristics for every planet visited in Star Wars. Right? Nope. I’ve underestimated the fandom. Wookieepeedia has just such a catalog,

Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.

A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than a place, more than a geophysical area.

I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world. This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.

The strategy of this book, then, is to awaken us from the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth) depends on it. The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. Convenience is not readily associated with historiography, nor indeed with geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily clear. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.

The first vehicle was an unmanned two-ton, hundred-thousand-dollar steel-caged contraption named ANGUS (for Acoustically Navigated Geophysical Underwater System), which had powerful strobe lights, a collection of thermometers, and, most critically, high-definition cameras. Late

the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study “the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes.” This wasn’t a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In

It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.

Los Angeles had its faults, metaphorical and geophysical, but it was not a malicious place. People were nice here. Hollywood was the grade school teacher who started you off with an “A” until you failed. New York was the one who gave you an “F” until you proved you deserved better.

We are individually preoccupied by the lives of those we know and expect to know: our grandparents, parents, children, and, if we are lucky, grandchildren. Which is why it is so fantastically difficult for us to recognize that in our frenzied attempt to keep nearly eight billion people fed, watered, clothed, sheltered, and distracted, we are fundamentally altering the geophysical composition of the planet at a pace previously caused only by cataclysmic events, like the massive asteroid that smashed into eastern Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago.

The temperatures range from plus to minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit during the two-week-long lunar days and nights. This heavenly body has never seen an earthling, never felt a footstep. But, as the scientific evidence from Apollo will help confirm, Luna is our geophysical sibling, separated from us in the violent formation of Spaceship Earth.

If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let’s say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we’ll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam.

I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world. This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.

Brad Werner, a complex-systems researcher (which sounds like a job that would be hard to monitor for a supervisor—“Oy, Werner, are you researching that complex system or are you dickin’ around on your phone?”) speaking at last year’s American Geophysical Union (which must surely use pornography on the invitation to have any hope of luring trade), said that our planet is fucked. He researched our complex system—the earth, I suppose, is a complex system—and concluded that we, the people who live on it, are fucked. I’m not even joking: His

The differentiation of science into its specialties is, after all, an artificial and man-made state of affairs. While the level of knowledge was still low, the division was useful and seemed natural. It was possible for a man to study astronomy or biology without reference to chemistry or physics, or for that matter to study either chemistry or physics in isolation. With time and accumulated information, however, the borders of the specialties approached, met, and finally overlapped. The- techniques of one science became meaningful and illuminating in another. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, physical techniques made it possible to determine the chemical constitution and physical structure of stars, and the science of "astrophysics" was born. The study of the vibrations set up in the body of the earth by quakes gave rise to the study of "geophysics." 'Me study of chemical reactions through physical techniques initiated and constantly broadened the field of "physical chemistry," and the latter in turn penetrated the study of biology to produce what we now call "molecular biology.

Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.

7.3-magnitude earthquake hits near Papua New Guinea A powerful earthquake struck off the South Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea on Friday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude-7.3 earthquake was located 61 kilometres (38 miles) southwest of the town of Panguna on Bougainville Island. It struck at a depth of 50 kilometres (31 miles). The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of a destructive widespread tsunami. But the agency said quakes of this size can sometimes generate waves that can be destructive to coasts within a few hundred kilometres (miles) of the epicenter. A staffer at the Geophysical Observatory in the capital, Port Moresby, said no reports of damage or unusual wave activity along

For the first time in human history we are now able to remove large amounts of carbon that are sequestered deep inside the earth and transfer it to the atmosphere, thus affecting global climate. This is part of what Revelle and Suess meant when they wrote in their landmark 1957 paper that “[h]uman beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.”65

> In the 21st century, intellectual capital is what will matter in the job market and will help a country grow its economy. Investments in biosciences, computers and electronics, engineering, and other growing high-tech industries have been the major differentiator in recent decades. More careers than ever now require technical skills so in order to be competitive in those fields, a nation must invest in STEM studies. Economic growth has slowed and unemployment rates have spiked, making employers much pickier about qualifications to hire. There is now an overabundance of liberal arts majors. A study from Georgetown University lists the five college majors with the highest unemployment rates (crossed against popularity): clinical psychology, 19.5 percent; miscellaneous fine arts, 16.2 percent; U.S. history, 15.1 percent; library science, 15 percent; and (tied for No. 5) military technologies and educational psychology, 10.9 percent each. Unemployment rates for STEM subjects hovered around 0 to 3 percent: astrophysics/astronomy, around 0 percent; geological and geophysics engineering, 0 percent; physical science, 2.5 percent; geosciences, 3.2 percent; and math/computer science, 3.5 percent. 

In his recent critique of fashionable ecological philosophies, Andreas Malm pointedly remarks: 'When Latour writes that, in a warming world, 'humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action,' he gets it all wrong: there is nothing intensively subjective but a lot of objectivity in ice melting. Or, as one placard at a demonstration held by scientists at the American Geophysical Union in December 2016: 'Ice has no agenda - it just melts.'' The reverse claim is that human interventions have only had such a menacing and even fatal consequences for our living conditions within the Earth system because human agency has not yet sufficiently freed itself from its dependence on natural history. This seems to be the conviction behind the 'Ecomodernist Manifesto,' for instance, which claims that 'knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, even great, Anthropocene,' and that a good Anthropocene 'demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.' In this confrontation, an age-old dualism has assumed a new guise: the attempt to establish a complicity with the forces of destiny - if necessary at the price of surrendering human subjectivity or perhaps involving other forms of self-sacrifice - is juxtaposed with the attempt to achieve human autonomy by subordinating the planet under the superior power of human ingenuity. These two positions, a modernist stance and a position critical of it, are usually considered to represent mutually exclusive alternatives. Actually, however, the two positions have more in common than first meets the eye. At the beginning of chapter 3, I referred to Greek philosophers who suggested that the best way to protect oneself against the vicissitudes of fate was to learn how to submit oneself to it willingly, sacrificing one's drives and ambitions while expecting, at the same time, that this complicity with destiny would empower one to master worldly challenges. What unites the seemingly opposite positions, more generally speaking, is a shared move away from engagement with the concrete and individual human agency (i.e., with empirical human subjects and with the unequal power distribution in human societies) toward some powerful form of abstraction, be it 'to distribute agency' or to use the 'growing social, economic, and technological powers' of humanity for a better Anthropocene. I suggest that we take a more systemic look at the role of humanity in the Earth system, taking into account both its material interventions and the knowledge that enabled them.

On the daytime side of Earth, the solar radiation hitting the top fo the atmosphere deposits around 1,300 watts of power per square meter. That's about the same amount used by an electric kettle. It doesn't seem like a great deal. But add up that incoming solar radiation across one whole hemisphere of Earth, and a total of about 174 petawatts (10^15, or a quadrillion, watts) of solar power is hitting the top of the atmosphere. A colossal total of 89 petawatts of that same power is absorbed by the surface of the Earth directly. The rest is reflected by the surface, or absorbed by the atmosphere reflected by its clouds of condensed water. By human standards this is a fearsome amount of Energy. Estimates of current human energy consumption suggest that in a single year we use roughly 1.6 X 10^11 megawatt-hours, which means that with 8,760 hours in a year we are using energy at a rate of about 0.018 petawatts. All life on Earth (adding up photosynthetic organisms, water transpiration in plants, and what life gets from chemical and geophysical energy) is estimated to consume energy at a rate of between 0.1 and 5 petawatts. In other words, despite life's potent footpirnt on the planet, on a cosmic scale it's still barely sipping at what the Sun's photons rain down on us.

Roger Revelle, an American oceanographer, and Hans Suess, a physical chemist, appraised the process of mass-scale fossil fuel combustion in its correct evolutionary terms: “Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”47 I cannot imagine what other phrasing could have better conveyed the unprecedented nature of this new reality

Studies of Earth’s chemical and geophysical cycles indicate that temperatures and CO2 levels would remain high for centuries even if emissions were cut to zero today; thus, it seems that only atmospheric carbon capture technologies can provide a large enough drain to lower CO2 levels quickly and deeply.

The roots of war are to be sought in politics and history, those of earthquakes in geophysics, of forest fires in patterns of weather and in the natural ecology, and those of market crashes in the principles of finance, economics, and the psychology of human behavior. Beyond the labels “disaster” and “upheaval,” each of these events erupted from the soil of its own peculiar setting. Still, there is an intriguing similarity. In each case, it seems, the organization of the system—the web of international relations, the fabric of the forests or of the Earth’s crust, or the network of linked expectations and trading perspectives of investors—made it possible for a small shock to trigger a response out of all proportion to itself. It is as if these systems had been poised on some knife-edge of instability, merely waiting to be “set off.

Over the past 40 years, a number of practical applications have been found for these remarkable manifestations of quantum sync. Josephson’s superconducting sandwiches, now known universally as “Josephson junctions,” have spawned the most sensitive detectors known to science. For instance, a device called a SQUID (for superconducting quantum interference device) takes advantage of the extreme sensitivity of a supercurrent to a magnetic field. A SQUID can measure a displacement a thousand times smaller than an atomic nucleus, or a magnetic field 100 billion times weaker than Earth’s. SQUIDs are used in astronomy, to detect faint radiation from distant galaxies; in nondestructive testing, to spot hidden corrosion beneath the aluminum skin of airplanes; and in geophysics, to help locate sources of oil deep underground.

It may be said with great confidence that dowsing has contributed and continues to contribute to geology, geophysics, ecology, medicine, and the economy of those countries where dowsers conduct their operations. Professor Alexander Dubrov, Russian Academy of Science If dowsers are operating by mere chance, it’s pretty amazing how they can be so successful. Amit Goswami, PhD, theoretical quantum physicist and Professor Emeritus, University of Oregon

If, as a society, we ate meat less, the world would indeed be a brighter and more beautiful place. Consider, for example, the impact on global warming. Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the University of Chicago, have calculated the benefits that would occur if Americans were to reduce beef consumption by 20 percent. Such a change would decrease our greenhouse gas emissions as substantially as if we exchanged all our cars and trucks for Priuses.

The green-house gas emission caused by us is the main ingredient in the poisonous cocktail of global warming which will eventually destroy your children.