The predictions of Walt Brown

"Rock ice" being, perhaps, like Greenland ice core ice? Or some rap/rock crossover act? I have falsifying data on the former, and no data on the latter.

Since it will land at about 18,000 miles per hour, yes, it will be hot. Remember the Space Shuttle? And even if it weren't heated to vapor by atmospheric drag, what do you think would happen to a bullet made of ice when it hits something at five miles per second?Don't make me do the calculation. You don't want to see it, Cosmo.Walt is either loony, or he's trying to con the people that slept through physical science class in the ninth grade.

Duh.
From what altitude do hailstones fall?
At what altitude would be the lowest stable orbit for Walt's silly-assed orbiting hail-ring?
How much air is there at these altitudes?
How fast was the Columbia coming down?

This is the best stuff on here since ...... I don't even know what!! But there was enough velocity to launch the freakin' asteroid belt, and to somehow promote most all of it to orbits out past Mars...but not water. With the Acme Gravitational Entropy Reversal Unit and Heat Separator, no doubt.

The last time I looked at his online book he did. And no, asteroids have very little chemical similarity to Earth's crust.Walt Brown, I tell you again, is eithe a loon or a charlatan trying to see how much he can con people like you and Cosmo who slept through science class. If the latter, he's doing a pretty decent job. P.T. Barnum would have complimented him, and then bought him out for a new sideshow.

It's because the magnetic poles aren't at the true (spin} poles of the Earth. A compass points due north in Kentucky, but 8 degrees off in Oklahoma at the same latitude.Look up "compass" in your Funk & Wagnalls'. It has more than one meaning, Tom.

Sort of an average temperature gradient used in the oil industry is 15 degrees F for every 1000 feet of depth - 10 miles + a 60-degree surface temperature then gets you about 855 degrees. That's well above the critical temperature for water. Gradients vary depending on where you live - 9 to 24 degrees per thousand feet just in Texas - but 15 is a pretty good average figure.Oh - and if Walt had cool water down there, why is there no temperature anomaly now? It's only been a few thousand years, and basalt isn't a real good conductor of heat.This message has been edited by Coragyps, 01-21-2005 18:01 AM

Yeah, indirect evidence, mostly. There are several thousand oil and gas wells that go 4 miles down, and at least a few hundred that are beyond 5 miles. The Kola experimental well, AFAIK, is the only one that reached 7 miles. Invariably, in any one well, it gets hotter as you get deeper - 15 degrees F per thousand feet, roughly. That figure depends on where you are. And drillers are very cautious about getting accurate bottomhole temperatures, because they have to cement the pipe into the wells. If their measured temperature is too much lower than actual, the cement can set too soon. This can ruin a $20,000,000 well. The investors get upset over such things.An extrapolation of those numbers has you over 800 degrees F at 10 miles deep. If you want to propose a reservoir of bathtub temperature water at that depth to make Walt's supergeysers more friendly to Noah's little boat, go right ahead. It would be no more bizarre or evidence-free than some of the other stuff you and he have proposed. But if you do, be sure and include a mechanism to heat rocks down to the deepest we've drilled yet, and then cool them from that point to Walt's mile-thick magically-supported cavern. And then heat them again to provide magma for volcanos.Why do I waste time on these absurdities? Is it just the entertainment?This message has been edited by Coragyps, 01-21-2005 19:47 AM

I missed or slept through that day in Physical Chemistry class where ol' Blyholder explained how vacuum sucks heat out of molecules. I can't find it in the textbook, either. Would you explain it a little for me, Tom?

No money, at least, 'cause it's online:
In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - The Hydroplate Theory: An OverviewAnd it's not all that big a waste of time. It's not as funny as The Onion, but way funnier than, say, Rush Limbaugh.

And, WMS, I take it you're still awaiting a reply?

Uhhhh...wrong. Space has lots and lots of ice - comets, Pluto, grains in interstellar clouds. Just get things cold enough and ice will be the stable form of water. Liquid water, now, is another story. You can make it freeze just by pulling a vacuum on it.

In Walt's web-book somewhere, he mentions 1300 degrees F as a likely temperature for his "caverns" of water. It's in the section on launching asteroids and comets.

Yup. A little beaker of water in a bell jar, and a vacuum pump, and you can even show something approaching the triple point of water - ice, liquid, and vapor all coexisting. The same applies for platinum or quartz - they have non-zero vapor pressures, too, at any temperature above absolute zero. But "non-zero" doesn't mean it's very big, or that you can transfer a big bunch of solid to vapor in the lifetime of the solar system at the temperatures that prevail out by Pluto. From my ancient Lang's handbook of chemical data, we find the following temperatures to get a vapor pressure on 1.0 mm Hg:
water -17 degrees C
nitrogen -226 C
carbon monoxide -222 C
methane -206 C
The lowest temperature the give for water is -98 C, and its vapor pressure there is 0.000015 mm Hg - and this is still over 100 C hotter than the other substances that are "stable" on Pluto. Water may be more unstable than the others to photolytic decomposition, but it would be much, much less prone to sublime than those three substances.

PY - your refrigeration thought is dead on the money, and yes, the ice will all sublime if you keep pumping.My handbook doesn't have vapor pressures for those other substances below 1 mm Hg, or I would have used them. I think that I remember that vacuums inside the solar system are on the order of the best we can get here on the ground.