“The solar magnetic field has long been known to cause the sunspot cycle. The physical shape and activity in the corona also varies with the sunspot cycle. The solar magnetic field is known to be able to transfer large amounts of energy to the solar atmosphere. It is possible that the solar magnetic field is the ultimate source of physical heating of the corona.” -NASA website
The sun’s surface is 6,000 degrees celsius. The sun’s corona is one to two million degrees Kelvin. Note the two temperature measuring systems.
Albedo: Reflection coefficient - the reflecting power of a surface. The ratio of reflected solar radiation from the surface of the Earth to incident radiation upon it. Albedo is expressed as a percentage and is measured on a scale from zero for no reflection ( charcoal) to one for perfect reflection of a white surface - fresh snow is close to one on the scale.
The albedo effect is the tendency of highly reflective, ice covered Earth to cool as it reflects sunlight and conversely, the tendency of less bright, more absorptive landforms and plants to absorb light/heat and to warm up. The cool get cooler, the warm get warmer. Note economic albedo effect as rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Warming and cooling economic and subsequent physical effects of “warming” and “cooling” on residential and commercial neighborhoods.
Precession: Axial and Apsidal: The wobble of the Earth’s axis is axial precession, the Earth wobbles through 360 degrees every 25,000 years. Axial precession affects the Earth’s weather. The rotation of the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun is apsidal precession, this also affects the earth’s weather.
Do sun cycles of heating-cooling caused by its magnetism or other mechanism affect Earth's climate?
The Earth has experienced five major ice ages in the past 3 billion years. During three of these ice ages: the Huronian, Sturtian and Karoo, the entire Earth was a giant snowball. This ice-snow was up to five miles thick. The volcanoes and hot vents in the Earth’s surface did not cease to exist when covered in ice, they created large and small lakes, pools, ponds, rivers and streams teeming with microorganisms in the total darkness. There were places where columns of heated water penetrated the surface of the deep ice where life was exposed to sunlight and the atmosphere. There were convection currents in these extremely tall water columns as warm water rose and chilled water descended. This turbulence allowed much intermixing of organisms and some synthesis of molecules large and small and biosynthesis of entire single-cell organisms: bacteria, viruses, archaea, molds, algae, and much larger single-cell organisms the protists: amoebas. A great merging of DNA, RNA.
Many amino acids required for life were present in subterranean pools during the Huron ice age. Proto-RNA molecules evolved a code for each of these so that a protein could be assembled at a cell rather than assembled willy nilly from the soup.
An organism has a system for creating RNA code for an organic molecule it encounters and a capacity to store this info at its RNA. RNA reverse engineers a code from free-floating molecules and assigns a code to recreate a desired molecule.
How does non-coding RNA install the code representing a new protein into its string of nucleotides? The code is cut from a visiting microorganism and pasted onto the RNA of the host.
Pocked Snowball - Imagine a spherical chocolate chip cookie made with very small chips. This would be the surface of snowball earth with the chips being geothermal puddles, ponds and lakes, all separated from one another and each containing its own variation for the recipe of life. Thousands of distinct microenvironments. The ice melts in a band around the equator linking 1,000 of these separate petri dishes. There is a microbial barn dance, a carnival of symbiosis, when mixing and matching and shacking up result - biosynthesis. more complex organism evolve from the simpler models of the pre-glaciation epoch. The glaciation forces dense concentrations of a wide variety of microorganisms into one another as their ecosystems shrink during the approach of the big freeze. They thaw in this state of togetherness in a very crowded environment during the snowball melt. As ice recedes, their territories expand.
Imagine 100,000 separate pools around the globe resulting from meteorites bearing amino acids, pools created at thermal vents, pools surrounding volcanoes. Every volcano has its surrounding lake on or below the surface of iceball Earth. The lakes do not merge all at once. first two then three then 1,000 or 1,000,000 years later a fourth pool is added then 10,000,000 years later, a fifth. Pools and lakes merge four by four during next 10 million years until there is an ocean. Lots of time for small groups to get to know one another before merging into a more varied assembly. Earth was not one big interconnected primordial soup during glaciations, it was 100,000 different organic assemblies for life. As the ice melts, as Earth’s atmospheric chemistry changes, still more cause for evolution. There were myriad different micro-environments for 10 times myriad recipes for primordial soup. Each volcano erupts through a unique geological core chemistry to seed its isolated lake with the chemicals of life.
Imagine a geothermal pocket, a “Hot Pocket” or call it a “Steam Dome” four miles below Earth’s ice surface, a pocket half filled, say 1,000 feet deep, with water and a void between the inside surface of the ice dome and the surface of the subiceerranean lake the ice dome filled with a warm, humid atmosphere. Each one of the countless steam domes has its unique chemical-atmospheric environment, Each hot pocket and its magma pocket, linked by cracks in the Earth’s crust is like a glass tube in a lab with two bulbs, one at each end - one molten rock the other warm gas hovering over melted ice. A test tube for life. Imagine the large array of micro-environments in such a steam dome and the fluid temperature gradient from the hot vent to the cooler fluid of the edges. The drippy underside of the dome - stalactites of concentrated chemicals, new surfaces for life. Pressure builds up within the vast dome and cracks find their way to the ice surface as they zigzag up through three miles of the stratified ice cover to the surface and sunlight.
One deep dome creates 50 small lakes at the surface. The dome expands to vast proportion and then it breaks the surface allowing sunlight every day and whatever atmospheric cocktail is at hand to influence the microorganisms. Imagine the Pantheon in Rome with an ice/ice water floor and a dome of ice and the oculus. The hole in the dome expands. In 500 years a very large lake has formed. Many of these large lakes, former domes, merge at the equator as the Earth emerges from its ice age due to reverse albedo - a warming due to larger and larger expanses of sunlight absorptive plant life and exposed rock. A band of blue water encircles snowball Earth. This equatorial band of water has two shorelines that encircle the Earth a north shoreline and a south shoreline, a widening band teeming with microscopic life in between.
The ring of blue water expands and twists and turns as new continents are revealed. The very thick ice is thinning always changing the chemistry of its pools. New comets and meteors strike and new chemicals of life are delivered from space. Imagine an under-ice lake 500 miles wide with an oculus five miles wide with the solar heated patch of water on the lake surface. What sort of ecosystems would evolve from such a structure with its geothermal vent issuing hot water 10,000 feet below? It would have warm humid air at the center and cool humid air above the 1,570 mile perimeter, clouds and rain below the ice dome.
A volcano would create an entirely different 500 mile diameter lake on the ice Earth surface with its volcano at the center and unique weather circulating around the active cone. A volcanic ice bowl. Perhaps much warmer water in this lake with sloping walls up to the rim of the ice. The Earth would have 1,000s of these volcanic lakes in the ice - another type of pock.
Foundational diversity from the following:
- Desperate marriages-symbioses as organisms try to stay warm, conserve energy as the Earth cools, ecosystems shrink and great ice sheets spread.
- As ice spreads microorganisms become more concentrated in smaller unfrozen environments. They cannot avoid one another and soon they are crawling all over one another, smooshed against and forced into one another as ice grows.
- Microorganism enter dormant deep freeze state while merged during Huronian glaciation -compressed genomes are not united at this point - just trying to stay warm and failing. After sharing the same lipid membrane, frozen in the ice for five million years as one, they thaw and believe ( chemically) that they were always one thing and proceed through evolution as such. Not only mitochondria entering and aiding protists but 1,000 organisms entering 100,000 others - myriad combinations - mixing and matching toward the big freeze and while emerging from the big thaw millions of years later or evolving continuously if near a warm spot. Is there a metabolic cycle affected by a freeze-thaw cycle that accelerates symbiosis?
Scenario One: Chicxulub-scale meteorite striking the three mile deep ice of the Huronian glaciation. It would send a cloud of ice around the entire globe causing a great acceleration of the cooling albedo. A deep dive into iciness. Ice dust in orbit for many years and ice dust storms all over the surface of the Earth. Albedo out of control getting colder. Visualize rings of ice orbiting the Earth like the rings of Saturn.
Scenario Two: All life on Earth began in Yellowstone Park near a large cluster of vents that prevented total ice coverage. The park was surrounded by a slope of ice that stretched at forty-five degrees for 4.24 miles to the ice crust rim. A comet impact at the thick soup of Yellowstone microorganisms spread bits of life along with ice particles to all parts of the globe. Raining life onto ice water pocks the world over where countless emergent genomes diverged from those of Yellowstone. Life gets a one billion year head start at Yellowstone before spreading around the world, seeds planted in the ice.
*
Addenda:
Economic albedo effect: Growing poverty / disarray begets poverty and disarray until hell freezes over - must have volcanic input into moribund system to reverse economic cooling.
See: Multi-strand woven steel wire cable as metaphor for rhizomic culture. Note cable cross-section of concentric bundled, varying diameter steel strands. One of the world’s great engineering developments: Albert, Smith, Newall, Roebling,Hallidie, Stone et al. Envision core cultural “givens” strands of language, religion, plant-animal classification, marriage-kinship, definitions of mental illness and crime, ethics, etc.
Liberal theory and politics and policy has, as its core notion, the dissolution of the family. No father - black or white, rich or poor - dad is marginalized or gone. In anthropological terms, liberalism is a product of the matrilineal mind.
A thought inspired by Foucault @ “Madness and civilization” Children as gradient reducing elements between lonely parents and the cosmic void; to be nurtured like the surface of the Earth nurtures plants, animals and microorganisms in order to span the differential between the hot sun and cold, dark nothing much, reducing the gradient.
At one bioscience website 3 billion is written as the approximate number of nucleotides ( single bases) at another bioscience website it is 3 billion base pairs. One of you is off by 3 billion. Can we come together on this?
*
September 27, 2015 5:07 pm