‘Tis in many many ways, almost unimaginably… poetic: the small hot red coal — moaning a gravitational song in the night, 140 million miles off… so very far away, and so faint. . . but when given enough time… into millions of years… that song is enough to stir our own deepest oceans of… life. Into whirlpools they tumble, over and over — across billions of years of time. Over the rocks from the basement of time, itself. Whoosh — that is amazing, to me.
And, of course, our own emissions are certainly a more profound, and immediate intervening variable — but it seems on about a 2.5 million year cycle, the orbit of Mars tends to give Earth a nudge — either elongating or rounding our orbital path around the Sun enough… to cause deep, deep whirlpools at the bottom of our oceans.
That in turn drives weather changes at the surface. Climate change, in short. The connection is born out in the sedimentary layers at the bottom of our oceans — of over 2 billion years. So… might there be a way to use this learning, to manage our own deep whirlpool creation mechanism, and help reverse the potential for collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation? Perhaps — as it seems our own efforts at reducing emissions are falling woefully short.
Here’s that Earth / Planetary science story, from CNN on a Tuesday (and a teaser) — do go read it all:
…For the Earth, this interaction with Mars translates to periods of increased solar energy — meaning a warmer climate — and these warmer cycles correlate with more vigorous ocean currents, the report found.
While these 2.5 million-year cycles affect warming and ocean currents on Earth, they are natural climate cycles and not linked to the rapid heating the world is experiencing today as humans continue to burn planet-heating fossil fuels, said Dietmar Müller, professor of geophysics at the University of Sydney and a study co-author.
The authors describe these currents, or eddies, as “giant whirlpools” that can reach the bottom of the deep ocean, eroding the seafloor and causing large accumulations of sediments, like snowdrifts….
Again — the age of darkness (ignorance) seems to be receding almost everywhere, except in US (and Russian) politics. For our part, we remain optimistic that rational, principled common sense will prevail, come November — again. Grin.
नमस्ते
