If there is a platform that has a list of unsolved engineering problems, would you be so kind to send it to me :)
Why is Mars so cold?
> The team studied the chemical composition of tiny fossils, about the size of a pin head collected from deep ocean sediments of the Caribbean Sea. They used this data to reconstruct the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere during the Pliocene epoch, around 3 million years ago when our planet was more than 3°C warmer than today with smaller polar ice caps and higher global sea-levels.
> "Having surpassed Pliocene levels of CO2 by 2025, future levels of CO2 are not likely to have been experienced on Earth at any time for the last 15 millions years, since the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, a time of even greater warmth than the Pliocene."
Someone on another thread was explaining to me how carbon dioxide dissolves into and evaporates out of the ocean. My understanding is that solubility of a gas increases as its pressure increases and decreases as the temperature increases. This person was telling me that if we began removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it would cause CO2 in the ocean to evaporate, due to the decrease in pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I had assumed that removing CO2 from the atmosphere would cause a decrease in temperature though - and asked why the decrease in temperature wouldn't counteract the decrease in gas pressure. The person told me that removing CO2 from the atmosphere wouldn't actually decrease the temperature, but rather, would stop the "equilibrium temperature" from rising.
I didn't completely understand this person's explanation of equilibrium temperature though. I get that the term basically refers to the temperature of the earth, when the amount of radiation absorbed by the earth is equal to the amount of radiation emitted by the earth - but there are lots of aspects to how this works that are still confusing to me.
Can someone who understands this concept help me get a better handle on it? I'm pretty bad at science - and essentially everything that I know about this particular topic I've learned on Reddit over the last few weeks.
The two main questions that I have are:
*When determining how much energy is "absorbed" by the earth and how much is "emitted" by the earth, how do you account for the energy produced by the earth's core? Does that get added to energy emitted by the earth? Does it get added to energy absorbed by the earth? Does it get added to both figures?
*Why does the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cause the equilibrium temperature to increase/decrease? I feel like I almost understand this, but not well enough to actually piece it all together.
There may be some other points of confusion for me as well, but these are the primary ones.
Thanks! :)
