Hello Kim, Peggy, Jonathan, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kim & Garth Travis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 8:41 PM Subject: RE: [Biofuel] Kerry's environmental car- yea right.(II)
> To the list, I tried to change the subject line but my computer won't let me. > > Greetings Peggy, > I admire your enthusiasm, but please don't leave us to starve on empty food > calories while you make fuel. Your cat tail project is great. Your > produce ideas are terrible. All the organic waste needs to be returned to > the land that grew it. Chemical fertilizers are killing us. Our food has > about 60% of the nutrients that it had a mere 40 years ago. Food waste > needs to be returned to the farmer, composted and returned to the > land. Any other plan for food wastes mean that eventually we will > starve. This is the real problem with biomass projects. Biomass competes > with healthy soil, and of the two, we need healthy soil more than we need > energy. Soil is a renewable and renewed resource. Estimates of the accretion to the earth's soil mass from extraterrestrial origins range from " as little as 1,000 tons/day (300,000 metric tons/yr, Dubin and McCracken, 1962) to 55,000 tons/day (20,000,000 tons/yr, Fiocco and Colombo, 1964). However, a more recent estimate puts the accreting dust volume at approximately 78,000 tons/yr, or 214 tons/day. This roughtly translates into spreading a layer of dust 1mm thick over the entire planetary surface in 63, 900 years to 2,47, 000 years. http://www.expanding-earth.org/page_10.htm "ACCRETION OF MASS External accretion of extraterrestrial mass is irrefutable. Everyone knows about meteors and meteor showers that regularly enhance the night skies at certain times each year. Meteorites, the solid remnants of meteors that land on Earth, are also known to almost everyone, even though few may have actually seen one. Every meteoroid (they come in all sizes, from small particles, to pebbles, to small rocks, and megaton meteorites) striking Earth's atmosphere at night creates a visible luminescent "shooting star" trail that indicates frictional ablation during its transit of the atmosphere. This is a visual signal of mass being added to Earth's surface. Whether or not a meteorite, or just its ablated dust particles, reaches the ground depends on its original size, its molecular composition, its angle of entry, and the depth and density of the atmosphere. Hard evidence of external accretion of mass is shown graphically in the Grand Canyon diagram showing successive layers of different types of sediments deposited at the rate of ~2m/Ma over ~500 Ma to a depth of one kilometer. Each layer was once exposed to the sun when it was Earth's surface, but now only the edge of each layer is exposed to the sun by erosion that created today's Grand Canyon. Similarly, worldwide coal deposits and palaeontology digs, millions of years old, are now covered by deep layers of overburden that did not accrete overnight. People overlook the obvious fact that such immense volumes of overburden must have been laid down gradually and successively in subsequent millennia. Each stratum in any geologic formation, whether a mountain range or a coal deposit deep below ground, had its own "day in the sun" millions of years ago before it was buried by subsequent accretion of matter from outer space. Today's atmosphere is denser and thicker than it was millions of years ago when Earth was much smaller, so fewer meteoroids result in large meteorites; most of them are converted by ablation into meteor dust that has a 75% chance of settling onto some body of water. This is the source of most of the deep sediments now covering the oceans' floors. Only the largest survive their fiery transit to become meteorites, but it happens frequently, and more often than most people realize. One of the most recent reports was of a 2.2 lb (1 kg) meteorite that fell 22 March 1998 about 40 feet from a group of boys playing basketball in Monahans, Texas. NASA is now studying the meteorite as a potential source of water because it contains halite crystals. However, it is fairly well known that rocks in general contain about 8-10% HÓO, which is the probable source of all the water now on the surface of the planet. The Moon's surface provides the best evidence we have that space is filled with fine dust particles. Neil Armstrong's boot prints at the base of the lunar lander and dust and dirt kicked up by cavorting astronauts proved that the Moon's surface is covered by very fine, powdery dust particles, particles that are not products of atmospheric ablation because the Moon has no atmosphere. The photo below of the astronaut drilling for a sample of moon rock from the large boulder in the foreground shows considerable soil atop the rock itself, and the surrounding area is covered with rocks of various sizes partially buried by fine dust and soil particles. High-resolution photos of the Moon show many large impact craters with smooth floors that are now pocked by subsequent smaller impact craters, which implies that massive accretion of dust has filled in the original crater since it was first formed. In the same way, extraterrestrial dust continues to accrete onto Earth's surface today, with a 75% chance of landing on some body of water, accounting for most of today's kilometers-thick ocean sediments. The daily influx of meteorites and meteor dust is well known to scientists, but the total volume of mass daily added to Earth's surface is difficult to estimate and is not well documented. Estimates of total volume published by NASA vary widely (or wildly?) just for dust alone, ranging from as little as 1,000 tons/day (300,000 metric tons/yr, Dubin and McCracken, 1962) to 55,000 tons/day (20,000,000 tons/yr, Fiocco and Colombo, 1964). However, a more recent estimate puts the accreting dust volume at approximately 78,000 tons/yr, or 214 tons/day. Such a wide variance in estimates is a good indication that no one really knows the true figure. Furthermore, it is highly probable that the daily volume has fluctuated over time, and there is no firm agreement on the age of the Earth that would provide a basis for calculation of an average daily influx, although the Grand Canyon layers appear to have been laid down at the rate of 2m/Ma. Using ages shown in the Grand Canyon walls, it took ~500 Ma to build up only one kilometer of depth, and beneath that are another 25-40 kilometers of older continental crust, so it is easy to arrive at an age of the Earth much greater than the 4.6 billion years now estimated. Age-dating meteorites without any knowledge of their origin has little value because it only provides an age for that specimen. The potential volume of accreted extraterrestrial material can be imagined from the estimates of Terentjeva that just the ten major meteor streams (the largest being the Quadrantids, Perseids, Orionids and Geminids) produce from 10-100 meteor impacts per hour for several days every year. Terentjeva also reported an additional 374 minor streams (154 of them with appreciable numbers) crossing Earth's orbital path annually "with a duration of not less than 3 to 7 days and an average rate not exceeding 2 meteors per hour." These numbers may not seem large or significant, but they represent additional volumes of extraterrestrial matter that must not be discounted. These estimates also do not include countless numbers detectable by radar in daylight, with or without atmospheric impact; or larger meteorites that pass through or glance off Earth's atmospheric envelope and may return to strike the Earth, Moon, or Mars on next year's transit. Then there are the larger and more massive meteorites that far outweigh any volumes of dust. Remnants of larger meteors often survive Earth's atmospheric friction and reach Earth's surface to become known as meteorites. Known meteorites come in all shapes and sizes, including multi-ton monsters found in museums, even a large one of pure copper, and smaller ones of pure gold, but only 10% are of nickel-iron composition and immediately recognizable as being extraterrestrial in origin. The other 90% of Earth's meteorites are chondrites and usually indistinguishable from ordinary field stones because that's what they are. Despite the public's current perception that large meteorites are rare, they are actually quite common in terms of geologic time. Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico has been touted as the cause for demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Barringer Meteor Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, is 1.186 km in diameter and is estimated to have been created only 50,000 years ago. Manicouagin Crater in Canada is about 100 km in diameter and is estimated to be ~215 Ma in age. Shields (1981) lists 21 impact craters ranging from 243 to 1100 km in diameter, and a quick search on the internet will disclose others that are not well known. >From the author's personal knowledge, Little Round Bay at Long Point on the Severn River, near Annapolis, Maryland, is a meteorite impact site. Little Round Bay is circular with a small rebound island in the middle, typical of meteorite craters, and the surrounding area slopes inward to Little Round Bay. These, and many other impact craters, are just the few we know about. Most older impact craters are hidden by accreted dust ablated by Earth's atmosphere, which is now far more dense than it was in earlier epochs when Earth was the size of Mars and meteorites were free to strike with full force and mass with little atmospheric ablation. What would the Earth's surface have looked like 200 million years ago when its atmosphere was much thinner? (For examples, look at panoramic views of craters on the Moon and meteorites scattered about Mars' surface.) For other examples, the author suggests that Hudson's Bay is a major impact crater from an earlier period. Hudson's Bay has been identified by Schultz, Klasner and Cannon (1982) as a probable impact crater from concentric gravity rings extending 1700 miles from Hudson's Bay to the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes and the great iron ore and nickel deposits are also evidence of a meteoritic origin. A North Polar projection map shows the Arctic Circle encloses what appears to be an immense circular impact structure. Greenland and the northernmost area of Canada, as well as the Brooks Range in Alaska, may be artifacts of an asteroid that may have formed the roughly circular Arctic Ocean shores of Siberia. The author speculates that, if this site could be proved to be an asteroid impact crater and dated as a fairly recent event, the huge size might qualify it as a candidate for the event that knocked the Earth into its present 23.5¡ inclination from the ecliptic, leaving behind flash-frozen mammoths with tropical vegetation in their mouths. (This is only one of several possibilities. Fixing the approximate date of such an impact is crucial in connecting the event to other known geologic events, as will be seen in the next segment.) © 1999, St. Clair Enterprises (Page last updated 2 Dec. 1999) " http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0418/p25s02-stss.html "Cosmic dust bunnies By Michelle Thaller | csmonitor.com Dust is underappreciated. Most people consider it a nuisance, something to be collected with a damp cloth and washed down the drain. And why not? Most household dust is made up of cast-off skin cells mixed with tiny dirt particles; nothing very inspiring. But, as it turns out, there's a reasonable chance that maybe one or two of the tiny dust particles comes from the deepest reaches of outer space. Cosmic dust is constantly raining down on the Earth from space, and in an average year, we pick up about 40,000 tons of the stuff. That may sound impressive, but when you consider spreading that amount of dust over the entire surface of the Earth, the challenge of actually identifying one of these cosmic dust grains becomes substantial. Can you imagine NASA scientists arriving at your home and analyzing the millions of dust specks in your house in hope of finding one of non-terrestrial origin? Talk about a needle in a haystack. But recently, scientists have been getting quite a lot better at finding these alien dust grains, and what they're discovering about them may eventually lead to clues about how life took hold on Earth in the first place. To begin with, let's ask the obvious question: how can you tell if a grain of dust comes from space? That's actually the easy part, as cosmic dust has a very different chemical and mineral content from anything else on Earth. Cosmic dust forms far out in space, possibly from the residue of a supernova explosion, or in the upper atmosphere of a giant, cool star. One simple cosmic dust identifier is the presence of iron and nickel in the grains. On Earth, both iron and nickel are extremely rare in surface rocks. Most of these heavy metals sank to the core of the Earth when our planet was still molten (a process called "differentiation"), and the rest of the stuff got rusted and oxidized away by the water in our atmosphere. Remember how long it took humans to discover how to smelt iron? For a long time, the only iron we had came from meteorites. It was only a few thousand years ago that we discovered how to melt down soft, reddish rocks and retrieve the pure metal. Another smoking gun of extraterrestrial dust is the ratio of iron to nickel atoms. In our Solar System, the Sun, meteorites, and cosmic dust all contain about twenty atoms of iron for each nickel atom. On the Earth, due to differentiation, the iron atoms outnumber the nickel atoms two hundred to one. There's other identifying chemistry as well. Some cosmic dust particles contain Helium atoms that are missing a neutron. Helium itself is extremely rare on Earth (we actually discovered it on the Sun before we found it here), but when we do find it, its nucleus contains two protons and two neutrons. However, in the solar wind, which is a stream of charged particles constantly flying off the surface of the Sun, we can detect an exotic form of Helium called Helium-3 (the 3 indicates the number of particles in the nucleus with one missing neutron). It goes without saying that any dust that contains Helium-3 atoms has spent a lot of time (as in billions of years) in space, with direct exposure to the solar wind. But perhaps the most exciting difference between cosmic dust and your average Earth-bound detritus is the weird kind of organic chemistry we find in the stuff. It surprises people to learn that space is full of organic molecules. Using spectroscopy, a technique that splits light into a spectrum and allows us to identify the chemical content of stuff floating around in space, we've been able to find all kinds of interesting things drifting between the stars, from water and ammonia, to alcohol and amino acids. But there's more: on Earth, we know of only 23 amino acids. In space, as well as in meteorites and cosmic dust, we've identified over 70. Amino acids turn out to be handy things to build bigger molecules out of, but all life on Earth uses less than half of the flavors available in space. Needless to say, if a particle has one of these exotic amino acids in it, you've surely got an alien dust bunny. So once we know how to identify cosmic dust, how do we find it? For a long time, scientists thought that we'd have to get up in space to get a good sample of cosmic dust, or at least get very high into the atmosphere. Once it hits our upper atmosphere, cosmic dust takes a very long time to settle down to the Earth's surface, so there's a good chance that any dust you find way up high might have extraterrestrial origins. Scientists started flying unmanned aircraft and balloons up to about forty miles altitude and exposing sticky collection plates to sample the dust up there, and they've had pretty good luck finding cosmic dust. But even at that height, there's plenty of contamination from Earth dust, so the grains have to be picked through one-by-one to find the cosmic dust grains. An interesting side discovery of this search has been the detection of living microbes at these super-high altitudes. To give you an idea, the International Space Station orbits the Earth at an altitude of approximately one hundred miles. These microbes are living at the very edge of our atmosphere, almost half the way to the space station! For the moment, no one really knows how the microbes survive up there, or even how they got there in the first place. Some people have suggested that aircraft toilets might have been the source of these microbes (think about that the next time you go to the bathroom at 30,000 feet), while some scientists have even gone so far as to theorize that these microbes don't come from Earth. To be sure, most biologists think the presence of alien microbes in our upper atmosphere is extremely unlikely, and indeed, some of these high-flying microbes have already been identified as terrestrial bacteria and funguses. But it does warrant further study, and plans are underway to catch some of these high-altitude micro-bugs. Another good source of cosmic dust can be found in exactly the opposite direction: the bottom of the sea. This may seem hard to believe at first, but the deep sea bed is a very pristine place. Hundreds of miles out at sea, there is very little wind-borne dust, and the sediment on the sea floor accumulates at the rate of only one meter per million years. Scoop up a few feet of deep sea sediment, and you've got a record of what's fallen into the sea and drifted to the bottom over a huge amount of time. And since cosmic dust contains a higher abundance of iron than normal, dragging a magnet over a dried sample of the sediment can often separate and identify the precious cosmic grains. Another great place for cosmic dust-hunting is Antarctica and the ice sheets of Greenland. Especially near the South Pole, thousands of miles from exposed, dust-producing soil, you've got to wonder where any little bit of grit you find came from. There, the strategy is to melt a good volume of ice and see what settles to the bottom. Some scientists even got the clever idea to check into what was at the bottom of their well at the South Pole research station. Miles away from any un-frozen water, the "well" worked by melting ice to produce drinking water for the South Pole residents. Over a few decades, a huge amount of ice has been melted, and has a reasonable amount of grit has built up at the bottom. Sure enough, grain-for-grain, there's a large abundance of cosmic dust at the bottom of that well. All this begs the question: why go to so much trouble to find space grit? Why should we care that whoever does the universe's dusting has been falling down on the job? For one thing, cosmic dust is a fairly unaltered sample of what our solar system formed out of about five billion years ago. Cosmic dust may even be leftover bits of the dust cloud that formed the Earth itself, and as such, may give us clues about how the whole process worked. But even more intriguing is the organic chemistry going on in the dust. Is it possible that complex organic molecules like amino acids arrived here from space? Perhaps it's not a coincidence that we seem to be built of molecules that are quite common in cosmic dust. Does cosmic dust seed the building blocks of life on new-born planets? Are we, in fact, what you get when you let cosmic dust sit around for a few billion years? At least it's something to think about, and there's a lot more we don't understand yet. So, as you go about your day, don't forget that we live in a gentle rain of dust from outer space, falling on your head, on your cat, in your corn flakes. And maybe, from now on, look at your dirty dust mop with a little more respect. Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. A massive-star specialist by trade, she currently dedicates most of her time to education and public outreach for the Space Infrared Telescope Facility. It can however be overexploited, depleted and done to death locally. > We need to re-evaluate what resources we have. Many people do consider > valuable items garbage and yes that does need to change. Invasive plants > are not all bad. Take our stickle trees here in Texas. Most people resort > to tactics like gasoline to get rid of them. Me, I grow them as coppice > wood. Bags of trash are building materials. Lots can be done, but not by > robbing the land of what it needs to produce healthy food. > Bright Blessings, > Kim <snip> Regards, balaji _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://wwia.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/biofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel archives at Infoarchive.net (searchable): http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/
