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252 comments on DrumBeat: September 8, 2008
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252 comments on DrumBeat: September 8, 2008
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I can answer that for you. Including the CO2 contributed from estimates of biomass/landuse, the amount of carbon equivalent from 1901 through 2007 would be a carbon ball with a mass of 466,800 million metric tons. That would be a sphere containing about 7 cubic miles of carbon or if you think like a borg, a borg cube of pure carbon that is 1.91 miles on each side.
In just the 20th century, 406,100 million metric tons were added.
In 2005, approximately 10,350 miilion metric tons of carbon was added to the atmosphere.
Hmmm, I wonder if comets are responsible for the end of the last Ice Age? Nobody mentions them as possible factors in climatic change (volcanoes are always to blame). And if they exploded in the upper atmosphere - or impacted on a thick ice sheet - no direct evidence would be left.
Interesting speculation. I'm sure scientists have already considered that if it were at all likely. There are not, to my knowledge, any comets or meteorites made primarily of CO2. These have been well studied and their compositions are well known. Also, there are other more likely sources of CO2 such as volcanoes which are well documented. Finally, the coming and going of ice has been studied quite a lot, as you might imagine. It's not my area but my impression is that each coming and going of ice has its own story involving volcanic eruptions, wobbles in earth's orbit, changes in the distribution of continents, biological effects and probably other things I'm not aware of.
It would be great if some scientist would put out a book for the rest of us giving an overview of the state of understanding of this topic. If anyone knows of one please post it.
If you're interested in meteorites the best book I've found is this one. It is a bit dated (about nine years since being published) but good enough for a broad understanding of the topic. Pretty amazing the amount of information we've gotten from these rocks that have fallen from the sky.
Meteorites and Their Parent Planets
Harry Y. McSween
Second Edition
If you get a chance, read "Under a Green Sky" by Peter Ward. It's an easy read and provides a pretty compelling case as to why only one of major mass extinctions is directly attributable to a comet/asteroid collision.
It discusses the signature(s), that one would expect to find from an object large enough to cause mass extinction (and would collide with the Earth's atmosphere at something on the order of 40-50 miles per second).