TC,
You mean gravitational potential energy, deformational instability, and resultant runaway subduction.
As I pointed out before we have already discussed the many
fatal flaws in Baumgardner’s bogus runaway subduction model in some detail.
http://
EvC Forum: Creationist Baumgardner: one of the top mainstream mantle/plate tectonics simulators! -->
EvC Forum: Creationist Baumgardner: one of the top mainstream mantle/plate tectonics simulators!
You don’t have the starting mechanism quite right. First he invokes an ad hoc mechanism, maybe suddenly speeded up radioactive decay, to heat the mantle super hot to reduce the viscosity by 10^8-10^9 in order to get the process started. He also requires an absurd value for thermal conductivity.
http://
EvC Forum: Creationist Baumgardner: one of the top mainstream mantle/plate tectonics simulators! -->
EvC Forum: Creationist Baumgardner: one of the top mainstream mantle/plate tectonics simulators!
The gravitational potential energy then drives the process and releases a
lot of heat.
--Yup, it will certainly vaporize a portion of the oceans, oh well.
It doesn’t just release enough heat to boil a portion of the oceans, it starts by releasing 3 time more heat than would be needed to boil all the water in the oceans and then it replaces the entire ocean lithosphere with molten mantle material that is generating a lot of heat and must release a lot of heat to solidify. While the heat would boil the oceans away several times over, lets just talk about what Baumgardner admits to, the boiling of a
significant fraction of the oceans. I did an analysis of this a few years ago that I have posted several places.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are about 5 x10^21 g of air. The heat capacity at constant pressure of dry air is about 1 J/g(its less at constant volume but this is a convenient number). For the steam from the boiling oceans to condense to form rain it
must release its latent heat of vaporization about 2225 J/g. This means that the condensation of 1 gram of steam to water releases enough heat to raise the temperature of 22.5 grams of air by 100 C and it takes only 5.1x10^23 J to heat the whole atmosphere by 100 C. Again according to Britannica, there are about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers (1.4 x 10^24 g) of water in the ocean. This means that boiling the entire ocean would release about
6,000 times the amount of heat required to raise the average temperature of the entire atmosphere to 100 degrees Celsius while only using about 1/3 of the 10^28 J released by the subduction process and none of the heat from the molten ocean floor.
Because you have several thousand times more heat than is required to sterilize the atmosphere it will not matter what the starting temperature of the atmosphere is. Boiling any truly significant fraction of the ocean will necessarily lead to air pressures well above 1 atmosphere, since atmospheric pressure is hydrostatic and the weight of the steam will be much more than the weight of the air. Temperatures will reach well above 100 C, because the boiling point of water will increase as the air pressure increases.
From my steam tables I calculate that boiling just 5% of the ocean will lead to an atmosphere of saturated steam at about 200 C. Steamed ark soup anyone?
Randy
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