Normal looking Muscovy duck, except he hasn’t grown into his face knobs yet. The mallard looks like he might be a hybrid Muscovy / Mallard.

Not questioning anything you’ve said here but am trying to reconcile your statement about minimal uranium in the core with high school level popular science attributing heat in the earth’s interior being due to, in part, the heat of radioactive decay. If the majority of radioactive elements have migrated to the crust through <geologic process terms I don’t understand>, what is decaying inside the earth (and where) to generate that 50% internal heating from radioactive decay

It can, but by enriching the 235 relative to the 238, you reduce fraction of the fuel that can be jumped from U 238 up to Pu 239 vs the fraction of U 235 that breaks down into barium, krypton and 3 neutrons. There’s still U238 in the fuel rods but with enriched uranium, there’s less of it available to be transmuted

Pickle Rick!

I kind of like the concept in one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels where they build a completely opaque planetary sunshield in front of Venus and freeze all the co2 out of the atmosphere. Then they have some kind of foamed concrete insulation/pavement over the entire surface of the planet to keep it down when they open the sunshield back up. Lastly, they wind a superconducting coil completely around the planet, pole to pole, and use it to create a motor in the sun’s magnetic field to create some rotation

Indeed it does, both of which are greenhouse gasses in their own. The water has a relatively quick recycle but the CO2 has a longer one, and needs to be treated as warming attributed to the original methane emission as it is CO2 which would otherwise not be in the atmosphere

Methane breaks down to CO2. The discrepancy is mostly like due to one method looking at the “instantaneous” warming effect vs the warming for total time in atmosphere. Methane warm at the greater rate for 3-5 years before breaking down to CO2. CO2 in the atmosphere has a residence time on the order of a century. So, methane has the much higher warming potential (84x) by integrating its 3-5 years at 25x CO2 and then another century at same as CO2

It seems like I recall seeing an article saying there were organic origin sediments layered onto the impact strata within a few hundred years, nothing like 30k years

Question for you about factors that contribute to earthquake forecasting. I notice the recent turkey / Syria quakes occurred on the day of the full moon. Since tidal stresses peak at new and full moons, this seems like an interesting coincidence. Is there any correlation with quake timing and moon phase.

I’ve previously also seen a study indicating more larger earthquakes occur during a certain phase of a 30 year cycle of earth’s interday rotation time variation. The prediction was more earthquakes would occur in the 5 years following the peak of the variation cycle. The peak was in 2017. Has there been any validation of an increase in large magnitude quakes during the past 5 years?

While not an expert in the field, one thing that is missing in your explanation is the relationship between fault displacement and stored energy. For the cascadia fault in particular I recall reading in SciAm about “slow earthquakes” where sections of the fault slip/move over a period of hours or days instead of seconds, and in doing so dissipate some of the energy/tension stored on the fault without an intense release of energy to create a quake

This is what grid scale batteries would address: storing energy for when this is load to take it. The “load” could also be co2 conversion to hudrocarbon fuels, another form of energy storage

They can be precise enough to know where it’s coming down. That said, Osiris ain’t stopping at the earth. It’s just dropping off a package and heading back out to intercept Apopthis

To add to that, the osris-Rex probe itself isn’t going to end its mission on return to earth. It’s just dropping off the reentry vehicle and heading back off into space where it will be targeted to flyby the asteroid apophis (the one that will have a very close earth encounter in the late 2020’s). This wouldn’t be possible if it slowed down to earth orbital speeds

There was a study about humpback whale songs spreading between different whale populations few years back. New songs were apparently invented by a whale population that lived along the Australian coast from Sydney to Tasmania. Later they traveled to Antarctica where populations from Patagonia also summered. The South American whales picked the Australian whale songs, then spread them up both sides of the continent. It went to the galopagos islands and from there to Hawaii. From Hawaii, spread to Alaska and Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile the Australians were making new songs that also spread up the Australian coast to populations in the equatorial pacific.

Not just the bit: the material itself. Glass in particular has cracking issues when there is a high heat gradient on the material being drilled/cut

If you read KSR’s Mars Trilogy, big corporations would have interests in resource extraction. Imagine a pristine planet where there’s never been thousands of years of human mining including 200 years of industrial scale extraction. Dunno whether mars would have ever had the processes to concentrate metals and other strategic minerals in deposits like there are on Earth; but it should be imagined as a consideration if the investment to create a mars colony is to be funded

Yeah, crossed the ice not swam. In part because the lake doesn’t freeze solid enough long enough reliably for other wolves to make the crossing

The wolves of isle royale in Lake Superior are from a small founder population that is badly inbred. The population suffers from a lot of mutations, poor health and low fertility/breeding success. A new male swam to the island about 10-15 years ago and it was hoped the new genetics would revitalize the population; but it’s my understanding it hasn’t really helped. The population is expected to go extinct. All this is to ask, are similar issues seen in the Newfoundland moose population?