The predictions of Walt Brown

How did you manage to double post? That's not supposed to be possible anymore. I'm going to try to double post this.About your link: http://www.geocities.com/magnetic_declination/#DECLINATIONIt says, "But since the Earth's field is the effect of complex convection currents in the magma..."We've been discussing this another thread, Geomagnetism and the rate of Sea-floor Spreading, and the concensus there is that the field is the effect of convection currents in the outer core, which is nickel/iron. It's the mantle that consists of magma, but we haven't found any sources that believe that mantle currents make any contribution to the field. Or is it that the metals in the magma influence the field?--Percy

Hi Tom,There's another way to look at this. I'm sure you've heard on the news the occasional item about an asteroid or comet that might strike earth. Often these news items are accompanied with the predictions of scientists of the damage such a strike might cause on earth. Scientists believe that an asteroid or comet with a diameter of about 20 miles would be sufficient to wipe out life as we know it here on earth. The asteroid thought to have been a factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs is thought to have been around that diameter.A comet of 20 miles diameter would contain about 4000 cubic miles of water. The water you're proposing to cover the earth would be about 400,000,000 cubic miles. That's 400 million cubic miles, about 100,000 times more water, and it corresponds to a comet about 1000 miles in diameter. That's roughly the distance from New York to Miami. Put that image in your mind. 1000 miles is 1/8 the diameter of the earth itself. This is huge, immense, enormous, titantic.Now that we've established a sense of scale, let's put it in the context of your proposal. You're suggesting that sufficient energy equivalent to sending a comet of 1000 miles in diameter out into space was used to raise all this water above the atmosphere without superheating the atmosphere and wiping out all life on earth.Have you ever watched a spacelaunch on TV with the tremendous and continuous blast of energy? All that energy is required to launch a payload weighing no more than several tons. Your water to cover the earth to a depth of a couple miles weighs 1.5 million tons. Let me put that in pounds. A spacelaunch payload might weigh 10,000 pounds. Your water weighs over 3,000,000,000 pounds. That's 3 billion pounds. That's the American billion with a "b". You need sufficient energy to launch that payload into space while keeping it from having any effect here on earth. Did you know that a safe distance to watch a spacelaunch at Cape Canaveral is several miles? Just to launch several tons?And as others have noted, when this water returned to earth it would again wreak destruction with heat and energy.Walt Brown's proposal was created in order to avoid invoking obvious miracles so that Creationism could seem more scientific, but all that does is change the nature of the miracle. He's chosen not to invoke the miracle of God merely causing rain to form from nothing, but his alternative requires invoking different miracles in order to protect life on earth from being cooked and flayed.--Percy

Thanks for the corrections! Everything in your post looks copasetic, except 8.5% is 1/12. I should have realized I was so far off on the weight just by inspection. Though the hypothesized comet becomes smaller, your corrections to the weight of water to be lifted into space make Brown's scenario orders of magnitude more ridiculous, literally!Tom, rather than rejecting any modification to or criticisms of Walt Brown's ideas, you might consider thinking of them as a platform from which to consider other possibilities that raise fewer problems. Walt Brown hasn't submitting his ideas to scientific forums, but your presentation of his ideas is gaining you a fair degree of scientific feedback, something Brown hasn't availed himself of. You could take this as an opportunity to plug that feedback back into Brown's proposals to produce ideas superior to his.--Percy

Comets are usually described as great balls of ice and dust and rock, and I've sometimes wondered how the ice survived in the vacuum of space, expecting that it would rapidly sublimate. I imagined that two factors were at work: first, not having a phase diagram of water and not knowing the actual temperature and pressure out in deep space where comets spend most of their time, I imagined that the temperature must be low enough for the ice to sublimate very slowly. And second, I figured that the occasional excursion inward toward the sun would sublimate all ice near the surface leaving only the dust and rock, which would act to protect the rest of the ice.I saw a couple problems with this view, though. The dust and rock covering would not be airtight, so the ice would still be exposed to a vacuum. And comets have been around since the beginning of the solar system, and it seems like even very slow sublimation over 4.5 billion years would be sufficient to evaporate all the ice out of comets of any size. Yet comets return to the inner solar system on a regular basis, and their tails reveal they have ample water.Your link hints that the scientists aren't considering sublimation as much of a factor, which surprises me. For example, Dr. Laurence Soderblom of the USGS says, "The spectrum suggests that the surface is hot and dry. It is surprising that we saw no traces of water ice." If ice on the surface would have sublimated, why did this scientist expect to see any? Either he's ignorant about this, which makes little sense, or there's more to this than we think.--Percy

I think this kind of clinches the debate in Walt's favor. If the solar system were really 4.5 billion years old, comets couldn't exist since the ice would have sublimated away eons ago. Seriously, this is an interesting little puzzle. I'm doing builds today, so I have small interstices of time to poke about the Internet. I'll post again if I find anyting.--Percy

Well, that answer was quick in coming! I was just about to start Googling.So the answer is that the sublimination rate of ice at low temperatures is so slow that objects the size of comets can last billions of years? Okay, that makes sense. But why did the scientist expect to find ice on the surface of the comet when he obviously is aware that past approaches to the inner solar system would have sublimated any such ice long ago? And that comet was fairly hot and the pressure extremely low - his expectation of surface ice makes no sense.--Percy