We should all remember Deplorable Patriot and Wheatie as we push forward with the fight. This is NOT over by any means.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Because JUSTICE must be served on those who foisted the “Vax” shit on us. And for all the other things they have done to this country.

“Don’t Tread On Me,” it says.
You failed to pay attention to this advice.
You went out of your way to do the opposite.
You chose to rub our faces in it,
imprison those who dared complain,
and even to kill our people.
Now you shall pay just a tiny fraction of the real price, Ratfuckers.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

RINO scum. Like Murkowski and Collins.

That’s OK. We go around ’em for now.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.

Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!

A Caution

Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.

State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Paper Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)

Last Week:

Gold $3,241.60
Silver $31.96
Platinum $971.00
Palladium $977.00
Rhodium $5,700.00
FRNSI* 155.812+
Gold:Silver 101.427-

This week, markets closed at 3PM Mountain Time Friday for the weekend.

Gold $3,325.30
Silver $32.81
Platinum $1,009.00
Palladium $1,002.00
Rhodium $5,675.00
FRNSI* 159.861+
Gold:Silver 101.350+ (Again, Yikes!!!)

Gold managed to push up into the 3430s (at least) on Monday/Tuesday night/morning. Apparently the Chinese markets were closed May 1-5. The Chinese markets tend to boost gold while the European and US markets push it down.

That said gold was back down to the low 3300s by Thursday evening, and seems to have settled into that range once again.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Leading Up To The Big Revolution In Geology

As of the late 1950s geology had made tremendous strides in about two and a half centuries. Geologists had come to understand a lot about rocks, how they were made, how they endured (or didn’t), and had used this understanding not just to reconstruct a lot of Earth’s past, but also life‘s past.

But a lot was missing, too. We knew, for instance, that land rose and fell; we had obvious ancient sea floor in what is today nosebleed-high mountain ranges. And we knew that it wasn’t because the water had risen, but rather that the land had risen afterwards.

What we didn’t know was why. Why was terrain being uplifted from time to time?

Geologists had won their argument with the astronomers over how old the Earth had to be, but that win left them with another aspect of this problem. If the Earth were indeed hundreds of millions of years old (as, by about 1900 at the latest they figured must be the case), then why did we have continents at all? They should have eroded away long ago!

Another mystery was volcanoes. They happened a lot in some places, and not in others. Why? No idea. I had access to an outdated book on volcanoes (probably written in the late 1950s) as a kid in the early 1970s. It asked this question and gave no answer beyond, essentially, “we don’t know.”

Today we know the answers to all of this. And indeed looking back on it, the geologists who lived through what can only be described as an Awakening (and yes, some of them are still alive), realize that geology made no sense without the answer. Oh, the little stuff made sense; mountains erode, volcanoes erupt, streams silt up, until you dug a bit deeper and realized there was no rhyme or reason to it when you tried to put together a big picture. Why were the mountains there to erode? Why weren’t volcanoes in New York State?

There really wasn’t a big picture.

And then, in not much more time than it takes for a Trump attorney general to be confirmed, there was a big picture!

What a glorious time it was to be a geologist!

I’m not guessing at this; I’ve heard many of them talk.

Plate tectonics brings order and sense to geology. Much like the periodic table brings order and sense to chemistry, gravitation brings sense to astronomy, and evolution brings sense to biology.

(You might want to argue with that last one. You’d be wrong. I’ve heard biologists talk too. Biology literally would make no sense–it would be a jumble of miscellaneous facts–without evolution to tie it together.)

So this is going to be the story of how we came to recognize that plate tectonics exists, and how it works. And it will probably take several posts to cover.

But first…some background. (You should have seen that coming.)

Igneous Rocks

There are three broad classes of rocks, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. (I hope this is a refresher to you, as I’ve covered this before.) Igneous rocks were certainly the first kind to exist, since those are the kind of rock you get when lava or magma cool and solidify. Then there is sedimentary rock, formed from bits of other rocks (of any of these types), that erode, are transported downhill, and (usually) end up at the bottom of a body of water where they become sandstone, or limestone, and things like that. Metamorphic rock results when any rock is subjected to high temperatures and pressures and undergoes chemical and structural changes without going all the way to melting and re-solidifying. Marble and flint are examples of metamorphic rock.

We’re going to concentrate on igneous rocks.

Magma and lava are typically mixtures of different chemicals, and as they cool the chemicals crystalize (and become minerals). You can tell how quickly an igneous rock cooled; if it cooled very slowly you get large crystals; if it cooled quickly you may have very small crystals, perhaps small enough you need a microscope to study them. In extreme cases there may be no crystals at all and the rock is considered a volcanic glass, like obsidian.

(A rock with crystals large enough to be seen by the naked eye is “phaneritic” while others are “aphaneritic.” As a side note to this side note, “phaner-” also appears in the name “Phanerozoic,” which is a hint as to where it got its name; the Phanerozoic is the eon where life was big enough to see. Though that’s a bit of a misnomer now since the Ediacaran period, right before/below the Cambrian and thus not in the Phanerozoic eon, also had life big enough to see. But that discovery post-dates the naming of the Phanerozoic.)

Lava being out on the surface cools quickly and generally has very small crystals, whereas intrusive rocks (like dikes and sills), and gigantic bodies of magma called “batholiths” are underground and cool very slowly; leading to big crystals. In fact, geologists will distinguish between extrusive (lava) and intrusive (the others) igneous rocks as the “mode of occurrence.”

There is also, independent of that, another distinction, a chemical one. Magmas in general are mostly silicon, oxygen, aluminum, sodium, potassium, calcium, iron and magnesium; these all go together to form silicate minerals, which make up at least 90 percent of all igneous rocks. Silicate minerals are made up largely of silica, SiO₂ (as I tried to explain the one time I dared to take up mineralogy), but not entirely. Different magma bodies have different proportions of these materials.

Felsic rocks have the most silica, and end up consisting mostly of quartz and feldspar, with other things thrown in like mica. The dividing line seems to be 63% or more silica makes it a felsic rock. And the result is either granite (intrusive, slow cooling from magma) or rhyolite (extrusive, quick-cooling from lava, fine-grained). These rocks are usually fairly light in color, and have a relatively low density compared to the other sorts of igneous rocks. (That low density has very important consequences, so don’t forget it!)

Below, some of the minerals that appear in felsic rock, plus a picture of some granite from an obscure location that I picked totally at random (right).

Intermediate rocks are 52-63% silica, and the intrusive version is diorite while the extrusive one is andesite. You might ask, “intermediate between what, and what?” Well, intermediate between felsic and…

Mafic rocks are 45% to 52% silica. The intrusive, coarse-grained type is gabbro, while the fine grained type is basalt. In general, these rocks will have a lot of pyroxenes, olivines, and calcic plagioclase in them.

Anything less than 45% silica is ultramafic. The coarse grained, intrusive example is peridotite, while the fine grained ultramafic rocks are komatiite.

If you do a deep dive there are further and further fine-grained (sorry. OK, no I’m not) ways of classifying igneous rocks.

The average adult has heard of granite. He may have heard of basalt. The other six broad kinds of igneous rock are probably foreign to him.

Most lava flows are basaltic in nature. Most rocks that form deep underground (known as plutons) inside mountain ranges are granitic. So there’s both a compositional and textural distinction between lava and plutonic rock. At least, usually. The exceptions are notable when they happen.

(Every once in a while I hear a tourist opine that Pikes Peak must surely be a volcano. No…it’s made of granite–see the picture above–much like the Appalachians. Granite doesn’t happen in volcanoes (or if it does, it’s very rare). Tour guides must be really tired of this one.)

The Earth’s Crust

(More background)

The Earth has a layered structure. The below diagram shows (lower left) to scale, and the notional “pie wedge” at upper right is not to scale. (We have some notion of these layers because we can “watch” seismic waves curving and refracting at the boundaries between the layers. The liquid outer core, in fact, blocks some kinds of seismic waves completely. I have described this before.)

The crust is on average 35 kilometers thick (out of a total of 6371 (average) or 6378 (max) kilometers to the center of the Earth). There is also the lithosphere, the top 60 or so km of the Earth (note that the crust is part of the lithosphere). The mantle lies directly underneath the crust and goes down 2900 km or so; it’s divided into an upper and lower layer about 660 km down.

Most of the mantle is solid but does flow over time; the very topmost layer of it is a lot more rigid which is why it is grouped with the crust into the lithosphere.

In fact the boundary between crust and mantle is where there is a sudden shift in the speed of seismic waves; this is the Mohorovičić discontinuity which for some reason I can’t fathom gets abbreviated to “Moho.”

In some cases upper mantle material has ended up on the Earth’s surface, and it’s generally 55% olivine, 35% pyroxene and 5-10% calcium oxide and aluminum oxide minerals such as plagioclase, spinel, and garnet. In other words, the mantle is mafic. It’s also much more dense than the Earth’s crust, which means that over time the crust is likely to stay “up there” essentially floating on the mantle.

One other thing that the diagram does is to distinguishes between “continental” and “oceanic” crust. Other than the fact that the oceanic crust is a lot thinner than the continental crust, does it really make a difference? Both are largely silicate, but it turns out the ocean floors are, underneath the sediment layer, largely made of basalt, diabase, and gabbro. In other words the ocean floors are mafic. They’re also only about 5-10 km thick.

Continental crust on the other hand is mostly felsic and can be anywhere from 25-70 km thick. (Note that the continental crust includes the continental shelves; geologically speaking they’re part of the continents, not part of the oceans.) Some really thick areas of continental crust are the Tibetan plateau and the Altiplano next to the Andes, where the crust can be as thick as 80 km.

So continental crust is lighter and thicker than oceanic crust. One would think the composition would be about the same everywhere, and likely less difference in thickness too, but no we have these pronounced differences and it turns out we now know it’s for a very good reason.

Note that the difference in thickness is greater than the distance from the top of mount Everest to the ocean floor, This implies that where there are continents the continental crust drops further into the Earth than the oceanic crust.

In fact it ought to remind you of icebergs, floating on top of a liquid medium with with a large portion beneath the surface, or sticking into the mantle layer.

I recall reading somewhere (I can’t confirm it) that if (say) ten feet were to erode off the top of Pikes Peak, then (given a lot of time) the mountain would “bob” up about nine feet for a net loss of elevation of a whole foot. Clearly to erode the entire thing away (it sticks up about 8000 feet above the surrounding terrain), 80,000 feet or sixteen miles would have to erode away–not just 8000 feet.

Below is a diagram with contour lines of the thickness of Earth’s crust.

And now, with today’s ramble plus prior ones, you have the background to understand the story of the great geological revolution.

We should all remember Deplorable Patriot and Wheatie as we push forward with the fight. This is NOT over by any means.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Because JUSTICE must be served on those who foisted the “Vax” shit on us. And for all the other things they have done to this country.

You failed to pay attention to this advice.
You went out of your way to do the opposite.
You chose to rub our faces in it,
imprison those who dared complain,
and even to kill our people.
Now you shall pay just a tiny fraction of the real price, Ratfuckers.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

RINO scum. Like Murkowski and Collins.

That’s OK. We go around ’em for now.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.

Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!

A Caution

Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.

State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Paper Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)

Last Week:

Gold $3,085.20
Silver $34.17
Platinum $993.00
Palladium $994.00
Rhodium $6,275.00
FRNSI* 148.247-
Gold:Silver 90.290-

This week, markets closed at 3PM Mountain Time Friday for the weekend.

Gold $3,038.80
Silver $29.56 (Yikes!!)
Platinum $931.00
Palladium $943.00
Rhodium $5,875.00
FRNSI* 146.002-
Gold:Silver 102.801- (Again, Yikes!!!)

There’s no sugarcoating things. All of the metals except gold took a beating on Thursday. Then on Friday things got simpler. All of the metals took a beating.

At one point on Friday, gold was down over 90 bucks. As it is, by the end of the day it was down $77.90.

Gold was up over 3100 earlier this week and even crossed the magic $100/gram line (equivalent to $3110.35). I noticed on Thursday it had slipped below that line just a touch, looked at it Friday morning, read something ending in 20-ish dollars, and thought it had blooped up over the line again…then I realized it hadn’t gone up ten bucks, it had gone down ninety.

Silver took a harder hit. Note that the gold:silver ratio is now OVER A HUNDRED.

As a side note at least sometimes I title this section Paper Spot Prices (or something similar to that) as the spot price is ultimately derived from the commodities markets, which in turn trade paper gold and silver; futures that you’re expected to sell to cut your losses (or realize a profit). Since most people are in that market to make a buck, there are huge amounts of silver or gold contracts out there that will never actually be executed. This is always true. It’s when someone decides, “no I am taking delivery” that life gets entertaining; sometimes a LOT of people do that and then the person on the sell side of the contract is legally obligated to deliver. So more than likely he has to go out and buy 1000 ounces of silver, or 100 of gold. (Or 50 of platinum, when that market isn’t in a coma.) Suddenly, outside of the futures market there’s panic buying; people desperate to get their hands on the commodity they shorted; often paying much more than the buyer is going to pay them.

This can often lead to the market price for physical metal being quite different from the spot prices; a few years ago you simply couldn’t get gold for less than $200 over spot (and that was when it was much lower than it is even after today’s beating).

In the meantime, Silver is on sale right now folks!

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Not Giving A F*ck

Kalbo (and then others) brought this to yesterday’s daily:

BREAKING: A White House official comments on President Trump's current "thinking".

"He's at the peak of just not giving a f*ck anymore." pic.twitter.com/Fr0BbeDNJr

— Intel Tower (@inteltower) April 4, 2025

There are multiple ways to not give a f*ck. In this particular case Trump has decided he has a job to do, that 80 million Americans (at least) elected him to do that job, and if you don’t get out of his way you will be lucky if all that happens is you end up with his footprints all over you as he tramples you.

Flerfs Eat Their Own

Nothing like leaving a cult to get those left behind to pull out the long knives. And sometimes you don’t even have to leave, just be nearby when someone else does.

Mark Sargent (he’s probably the most famous Flat Earther to the general public; he’s the fairly clean-cut, blond guy with the baseball cap who gets interviewed a lot and showed up in documentaries) and Dave Weiss (Flat Earth Dave, the Potato, Dirth [his channel is DITRH], the guy with the leaky app), and two other prominent Flerfs who have not been named–have been sent “Cease and Desist” letters by lawyers for three ex-Flerfs for claims the flerfs have made about them. (Text visible at approximately the 5:50 mark). One of ex-Flerfs is Patricia Steeres, who was Mark Sargent’s co-host until recently, then she left. (Mark has characterized it as a “breakup” even though they never dated.) The other two are Robby Davidson and “Paul on the Plane.” (These two are not ones I am familiar with except I think Robby Davidson is known for having quit Flat Earth as soon as he realized Dave Weiss and Eric Dubay had no interest in going to Antarctica in spite of saying so earlier. Too obviously they were bluffing and their bluff had been called.)

Did they cease and desist? Well, no. MC Toon did a livestream over 4 1/2 hours demonstrating that Sargent, at least, did not do so. I’m going to link it but I certainly don’t expect you to watch it unless you are an absolute glutton for punishment:

[Another fun activity on these long MC Toon livestreams is he has people sign into the chat and try to warn people that Dirth’s app is leaky, just to see how fast their comments get censored and themselves get banned. Clearly Menagerie is in their employ. He will also call the Flerfs up and leave taunting voicemails when they don’t answer.]

Next…some Flerfs are going after Lisbeth Acosta. Lisbeth is the Flerf who won a free trip to Antarctica, which turned out to be a sham prize. Will Duffy was suckered into awarding it and then the donor turned out to be a Flerf troll. There was an INSTANT rallying of globers to contribute to pay for her ticket so she got to go anyway. Apparently what she saw did not convince her, though since she decided to be Mark Sargent’s co host when Patricia Steeres left. (McToon begged her not to take the job.)

Sticking with Flat Earth isn’t enough though, since Fkatzoid decided to go after her.

Apparently, Lisbeth was prostituted out to the other Final Experiment goers to get them to toe the Globe Earth line when they came back. Fkatzoid calls her the “Village Bicycle.” This too is worthy of a lawsuit, however Fkatzoid lives in South Africa and has no money. (His job is mixing paints.) Perhaps some of the others can be gone after.

So not only is this guy the absolute best evidence for the Dunning-Kruger effect that I have ever seen (remember he argued against Critical Think’s weight experiment, and also go into it with Will Duffy about the location of the south pole), he is an absolutely shitty individual who would deserve a throat punch and a curb stomp even if he wasn’t an idiot.

Isochron Dating

Recall from last time that uranium-lead dating done on zircons lets one assume there were no daughter lead isotopes in the zircons when the zircons were first formed. That’s because the zircon crystallization process rejects lead while accepting uranium. However, there’s always the possibility that after some period some of the daughter isotopes (the lead) will leach out of the zircon crystals, which will have the effect of making the dating result look younger than it actually is.

The fact that there are two different pairs of uranium-lead parent-daughter isotopes allows us not only to detect that that has happened, but to correct for it, by taking several samples out of the same igneous rocks and then plotting the results on a “concordia diagram” then drawing a straight line to intercept the curve plotted for ideal cases where no lead has been lost.

Zircons can often turn out to be much older than the rocks they are in; they melt at a very high temperature and granitic magma doesn’t typically get that hot. So if you find a zircon in an igneous rock, it might be much older than that rock.

So to use uranium-lead dating in other places (not zircon crystals) we need a way to account for the likelihood that there was lead present in the rock when it formed. Then uranium lead dating can be used in more situations. And we can use it for other sequences, for example the rubidium-strontium decay (rubidium-87 to strontium-87 by beta decay, half life 49,720 million years; rubidium is element 37, strontium is element 38) and the samarium-neodymium decay (samarium-147 to neodymium-143 by alpha decay, half life 106,000 million years; samarium is element 62, neodymium is element 60). (There is another isotope of samarium, Sm-146, that has a half life of 92 million years, decaying by alpha decay to Nd-142, which could conceivably be used, however, that half life is just short enough that we can no longer detect any natural traces of samarium-146…so that clock has run out.)

All three sequences–four, really since there are two uranium-lead sequences–can benefit from isochron dating. (Isochron comes from the Greek for “same time.”) They aren’t the only ones, but they seem to be mentioned most often when I find an article about isochron dating.

Isochron dating is done by taking multiple samples. It works so long as: the samples all have the same origin (minerals from the same rock, rocks from the same geological unit)–this ensures that all samples had the same initial isotopic composition. And we assume nothing leaks out of the rock over time (the opposite of the situation with the zircon crystals, which could lose lead over time).

Note that there is no assumption that the daughter isotope was absent from the rock initially.

One more thing that is needed, is a non-radiogenic isotope of the daughter element. For rubidium-strontium strontium-86 fits the bill; nothing decays into that isotope. And for samarium-neodymium, neodymium-144 is used. Again nothing decays into it. (However, it is very slightly radioactive with a half life of 2,290,000,000 million years, about 170,000 times the age of the universe. Not enough to matter; in fact so little of it has decayed so far we can’t even think of using it for dating in a hypothetical neodymium-cerium dating sequence; we’d get no reading at all.)

Let me put that into a handy-dandy table:

Rubidium and strontium are admittedly obscure to the man in the street, but they are workaday elements, appearing to some extent in many rocks. Rubidium is potassium’s big brother, somewhat rare but it will substitute for potassium in minerals. Strontium, similarly is calcium’s bigger brother. Calcium is very common in the Earth’s crust, and strontium atoms will occasionally substitute for them. These elements are stable, or thought of as being stable, but as it happens 27.8 percent of all rubidium is actually rubidium-87, so your typical sample of rubidium is actually weakly radioactive. The daughter strontium-87 isotope is 7 percent of all strontium, while the reference isotope Sr-86 is 9.86 percent of all strontium. (Almost all the rest of the strontium is Sr-88.)

Samarium and neodymium are rare earth elements…yes, actually rare earths. They tend to be dispersed throughout the crust and there are few ores. Nevertheless, “rare” is a bit of misnomer; on average there is about three times as much samarium in the crust as there is tin. 15 percent of all samarium is samarium-147 (which means that samarium-147 by itself is roughly half as common as tin), but with a 106 billion year half life, you can probably think of it as just barely radioactive. The decay product, Nd-143, is roughly 12.2 percent of all neodymium, and the reference isotope, Nd-144, is 23.8 percent of all neodymium (and is very, very, very weakly radioactive).

So yes these isotopes can be found in rocks, fairly readily.

How Isochrons Work

Recall from last time we showed formulae expressing radioactive decay just showing the simple case where we started out with no daughter isotope. Here is a slightly more complex formula for the number of daughter isotope atoms:

This one has a D0 term, which is the initial concentration of daughter isotope atoms; i.e., what was in the rock when it formed. n is the present number of parent isotope atoms. The entire second term is the number of daughter isotope atoms that have resulted from the decay of the parent isotope, from the formation of the rock to the present day. Note that this formula is written in terms of the decay constant, not the half life. See the prior post for more information on this, but it’s 1 divided by [the half life multiplied by the natural logarithm of 2].

Since the isotopes are measured by mass spectrometry, it’s more convenient to deal with the ratios between the numbers, not the absolute numbers. So here is where we introduce the reference isotope (the non-radiogenic one); we’re going to divide all terms by that number, to get a bunch of isotope ratios.

The first term is the total amount of daughter isotope, divided by the total amount of the reference (non-radiogenic) isotope. This is something we measure. The second term is the initial amount of daughter isotope, divided by the amount of reference isotope. We don’t know this, because we don’t know the initial amount of daughter isotope. (But note, we’re not claiming this number is zero, as we were with the zircons.) The third parentheses surround the amount of parent isotope today, divided by the amount of reference isotope. This is something we can measure. The final bit is the proportion of daughter isotope generated by decay (so far) of the parent isotope; which depends on the age, which we don’t know.

But this is very very similar to:

y = b + xm

…which is the “generic” equation for a line (albeit rearranged a bit). b is where the line crosses the y axis, and m is the slope of the line. So if we substitute as follows:

y = D*/D_ref (we measure this)
b = D₀/D_ref (we don’t know this but it’s constant for a given rock)
x = P_t/D_ref (we measure this)
m = e^λt – 1 (we don’t know this but it’s constant for a given rock)

…well we might be able to do something about this. Note that in the line equation, b and m are supposed to be constants. Indeed for a specific rock, of some age (which we don’t know yet), D₀/D_ref (b) is indeed a constant; it should be the same everywhere within the rock. As should e^λt – 1 because every part of a given rock is the same age, this is m. Of course m is the slope of our straight line. Note that it gets steeper the higher t goes.

The two things that correspond to x and y are the things we actually measure. So we can plot our measured y against our measured x and now we have one point on this line. Well by itself one point isn’t useful. We expect m will be a positive number, and b will be above zero (since there is more than zero daughter isotope in the rock)

So take another sample, of a different mineral in the same rock. Then take a few more. Plot them, y versus x.

If all of those points fall on a straight line…we can draw the line and figure out m and b. The first will tell us how old the rock is (by solving for t), the second is actually going to tell you how much daughter isotope there was initially; information that might be interesting but doesn’t directly help us date the rock.

If the line is not straight, something probably happened to the rock after it formed, that invalidates our assumptions. If you have six points and only one is out of line, you can treat it as an outlier (but of course when you write up your paper, you point this out!).

Examples

Here’s a sample (apparently not a “live” sample but just an illustration). Note that different minerals from the same rock are all analyzed, as well as “whole rock”

The X axis is the present day parent (rubidium 87) – reference (strontium-86) ratio (matching what I showed above as being “x”), and the Y axis is the daughter (strontium 87) to reference (strontium-86) isotope ratio. The y intercept is labeled as being the initial daughter/reference ratio; that tells us how much daughter isotope there was originally. And the slope is our decay term, the steeper the slope, the higher the value of t is.

Here’s an actual plot from a real measurement. Note that three of the minerals tested are clustered very close together near the left hand margin, and the computed ratio of daughter isotope present at the beginning, to the reference isotope, is 70 percent. And finally notice the age: 609.5 million years (give or take 2.5 million years).

So the short version of this is, isochrons can help you identify and correct for the sorts of things that those with a little bit of knowledge of radiometric dating might bring up as objections, of the form “but what if there was some daughter isotope already present?” But it will only work if the rock hasn’t lost any daughter isotope since it was formed; if it has, the line won’t be straight. The good news is when this happens, the data says it happened, and if you’re alert you won’t be fooled.

A bit more of this (I want to cover potassium-argon dating in particular, and then discuss carbon-14 dating even though it’salmost totally irrelevant to geology) and we’ll get back to the main narrative.

We should all remember Deplorable Patriot and Wheatie as we push forward with the fight. This is NOT over by any means.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Because JUSTICE must be served on those who foisted the “Vax” shit on us. And for all the other things they have done to this country.

You failed to pay attention to this advice.
You went out of your way to do the opposite.
You chose to rub our faces in it,
imprison those who dared complain,
and even to kill our people.
Now you shall pay just a tiny fraction of the real price, Ratfuckers.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

RINO scum. Like Murkowski and Collins.

That’s OK. We go around ’em for now.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.

Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!

A Caution

Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.

State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,936.30
Silver $32.53
Platinum $980.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 141.044-
Gold:Silver 90.265+

This week, markets closed at 3PM Mountain Time Friday for the weekend.

Gold $2,858.10
Silver $31.20
Platinum $953.00
Palladium $945.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 137.261-
Gold:Silver 91.606-

Well gold got beat with the ugly stick this week, particularly Thursday and Friday, dropping almost 80 bucks since last Friday.

Silver got beat with the butt-ugly stick; notice that the gold:silver ratio went up even as the gold price went down, meaning silver went down harder.

Silver is on sale right now folks!

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

With Trump now FINALLY restored to his Rightful Office, I was wondering what to name my posts. Continuing to complain that Biden didn’t win when Biden no longer effing matter any more than roadkill seen in the rearview mirror, seemed pointless. Even if it was a monument to Wheatie.

This should have been a week of joy. And indeed much good has happened, a wonderful start!

And then we found out that DePat…Susie…had taken her leave, very much before time. In fact just before she could see Trump restored to office.

DePat and I clashed loudly from time to time but I have nothing but respect for the time and effort she put in on her posts. (This is something I know about being one of the other authors.) To be sure she didn’t do much of the kind of writing she was certainly capable of, but the time it must have taken to gather all of those memes, articles and what-not is substantial. (Seriously when did she find the time?) And she would be visibly frustrated when she couldn’t throw a big pile of them together. Me, I’ll just say “no science post” and move on.

I suppose we can’t know DePat was killed by the Covid Vax in super-hyperdrive reach-out-and-kill-someone mode, though it certainly seems very likely indeed that it found DePat worn out and pounced.

That damned jab has killed hundreds of thousands if not millions…and it’s the “gift” that keeps on giving. If they never gave another slab jab from this moment forward, it would continue killing for years.

What we can know is that this was way too damned early. And for it to happen just before the inauguration she had been waiting for would strike me as incredibly “in-your-face, fuck you” injustice if I were to believe it was done by agency. (And yes, I’ve read the flip side of that viewpoint a lot here, so no need to explain it (again) on my account.)

Perhaps DePat can serve as a symbol of those it killed, even if it were to turn out that she wasn’t one of its victims.

And we should all remember her, and Wheatie, as we push forward with the fight. This is NOT over by any means.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Because JUSTICE must be served on those who foisted that shit on us. And for all the other things they have done to this country.

You failed to pay attention to this advice.
You went out of your way to do the opposite.
You chose to rub our faces in it,
imprison those who dared complain,
and even to kill our people.
Now you shall pay just a tiny fraction of the real price, Ratfuckers.

Welcome Back, 4GodandCountry

I have no idea if you enjoyed my science posts before you went on sabbatical (I do remember you were enthusiastic about my post on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing). If so you have plenty of catchup. Largely on physics, but a few side excursions, lately a walk through the solar system and I’ve just started on geology (if I can quit slacking and put out part II).

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

RINO scum. Like Murkowski and Collins.

That’s OK. We go around ’em for now.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.

Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!

A Caution

Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.

State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,703.00
Silver $30.41
Platinum $948.00
Palladium $975.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 129.758-
Gold:Silver 88.885+

This week, markets closed at 3PM Mountain Time Friday for the weekend.

Gold $2,771.70
Silver $30.64
Platinum $957.00
Palladium $1,008.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 133.081-
Gold:Silver 90.460+

Gold went up nicely. While it was climbing, silver struggled to keep its head above the water and finally went up 17 cents on Friday–which was most of its gain for the week. So it now takes over ninety ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold, and that’s assuming of course you don’t have to give the moneychanger a cut.

Silver is on sale right now folks!

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

This post is scheduled to go “live” at 10:01PM MST on Friday, December 20, 2024. That’s 00:01 EST on Saturday, December 21, 2024 for those of you in that benighted timezone near the Atlantic Ocean.

As of that moment, there are 30 days, 11 hours, and 59 minutes until our rightful President of the United States is restored to office.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.

Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!

A Caution

Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.

State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,647.50
Silver $30.62
Platinum $934.00
Palladium $976.00
Rhodium $4,875.00
FRNSI* 127.073-
Gold:Silver 86.463+

This week, markets closed at 3PM Mountain Time Friday for the weekend.

Gold $2,623.40
Silver $29.58
Platinum $935.00
Palladium $948.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 127.907-
Gold:Silver 88.688+

Silver down over a dollar…which sounds bad until I tell you it went up fifty cents on Friday, and is still down over a dollar. So Thursday, it really sucked. And the gold:silver ratio is getting really, really bad.

The only thing that went up is…miracle of miracles…platinum, which is still on fricking sale.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

It Sucks To Be A Flat Earth Charlatan

If you are a flat earth charlatan, my just telling you you suck would be the LEAST bad aspect of your life. How can you look at yourself in the mirror?

As for everyone else (including Flat Earth true believers–i.e., the victims of the charlatans), you all likely know that The Final Experiment (TFE) happened this last week. At this point the participants are on their way home, except for Critical Think, whose flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago Chile isn’t for another day or two. Then he flies directly from Santiago to Sydney Australia…oh, wait, I forgot, that flight doesn’t exist according to Flat Earthers.

In many cases they collected terabytes of data. (“tera” is what comes after “giga” if you don’t know. “Tera” equals “trillion” (twelve zeroes) and that should be easy to remember because both start with t.) One person recorded over 24 hours of 11K video (not a time lapse, full time video) of the sun. Others took numerous sun spot shots (and they have thousands of emails from people like me waiting for them, for comparison). But it’s taking them days to get back, and now they have to deal with the holidays. So don’t expect much out of them before New Year’s. As for the documentary the one flat-earther professional is putting together, who knows how long that will take. They have all kinds of stuff, that should sink this bullshit once and for all, but won’t, because many of their followers are having cult psychology kick in. “Terabytes of evidence against my position? It must be fake. I can’t possibly just be…wrong about this.”

I’ll post a couple of videos here, some of them are repeats. This one is SciManDan, a Glober who was not part of TFE, talking about various types of copium being taken by the Flerfs:

Here’s something new I found. Lots of clips up front of the Flerfer charlatans insisting that what was seen could not possibly exist–which to me would mean that what was seen invalidates the Flat Earth. But these people move the goal posts. Once that evidence comes up, they need something else…yeah, that is what you need to disprove flat earth. (Marred by the fact that Peterson confuses Ushuaia Argentina with Punta Arenas, Chile):

And this is one I posted earlier. McToon (Glober) is letting Nathan Oakley (Flerfer Charlatan) have it with both barrels.

Wolf took exception to this, thinking McToon was over the top. I disagree. Oakley is a fraudster. This is the least of what that species of “human” deserves. They should have “CON MAN” tattooed on their foreheads.

I will, nevertheless post a Nathan Oakley response:

Precession of the Equinoxes

We’ve got a lot of prerequisites fresh in our minds, so let’s take up precession of the equinoxes, a subject that seems to come up frequently. And I’d normally not touch it with a ten foot pole or a lot of graphics. An animation would be best honestly, and I found one but I wish it showed a bit more (like relation with the Earth’s orbit).

Remember this from last week?

Since the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted about 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbit, the celestial equator is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic, as shown below.

Last Week

But then I went on to say:

But since we’re thinking in a set of coordinates that goes from the celestial equator, we think of it the other way around: we think of the ecliptic being tilted with respect to the celestial equator.

Me rambling on more, last week

Well this time we are going to think the the way the diagram shows; the ecliptic will be the basis of another coordinate system, known as…drumroll…the ecliptic coordinate system.

There are actually two ecliptic coordinate systems, one centered on the Sun (heliocentric), the other on the Earth (geocentric). Since the planets generally orbit in planes almost aligned with the Earth’s orbital plane (which is the ecliptic plane), and the Sun is the center of gravity of the solar system, the sun-centered system is very useful for talking about the solar system. Indeed, even though I didn’t mention it at all in the recent series on the planets, I have used it here–go back to the articles on the great conjunction almost exactly four years ago; I did those plots in that system.

But we’ll focus on the Earth centered (geocentric) version this time.

For both systems (as well as the equatorial system I talked about) the primary line is the one pointing towards the vernal equinox (or March equinox, or (sometimes) the “first point of Aries”). It lies in the “reference plane” of all systems. For the ecliptic system, the “poles” are simply a line perpendicular to the ecliptic plane; in the diagram above they are called the north and south ecliptic poles.

In the ecliptic system, the two coordinates are called ecliptic longitude and ecliptic latitude and both are measured in degrees; no mucking around with hours of right ascension and minutes and seconds of arc that aren’t the same kind of minutes and seconds as the other minutes and seconds.

In the heliocentric system longitude is represented by l (italic lower case L) while in the geocentric system it’s represented by Greek letter lambda, λ. Latitude is represented by b (heliocentric) or β (geocentric).

Or, if you know the distance to whatever it is you’re considering, you can go Cartesian, a grid instead of spherical coordinates:

x = r cos β cos λ
y = r cos β sin λ
z = r sin β

The x axis points towards the first point of Aries, the y axis is 90 degrees counterclockwise from it in the ecliptic plane, and z points toward the north ecliptic pole. The formula is the same for the heliocentric system (swapping b for β and l for λ) and it was the Cartesian version of the helicentric system I worked with in those old posts from four years ago. (And similar conversions can be done with equatorial coordinates.)

[Digression: Both equatorial and ecliptic coordinates are considered “right handed” coordinate systems. Why? Imagine pointing the fingers of your right hand along the x axis, then bending them to point along the y axis (or, if in spherical coordinates, curling the fingers in increasing longitude or right ascension). Raise your thumb like “thumbs up” and it points along the z axis. On a left handed system, this works for the left hand instead. I find this easier than whiddershins and diesel or whatever those words were.]

Imagine a line drawn from “Autumnal Equinox” through the Earth to “Vernal Equinox.” It’s the intersection of the celestial equatorial plane and the ecliptic plane. (Two planes that aren’t parallel and aren’t the same plane, will intersect in a line.) It just happens to be the case that Earth is tilted in such a way that this particular line represents the intersection (and is the X axis in both the equatorial and ecliptic systems).

What if it were in a different place? It’s pretty arbitrary, isn’t it? Why couldn’t it be in a different place?

It would be, if the Earth’s equator were oriented differently–meaning, also, “if the earth’s axis were pointed differently.” Oh, I suppose the Earth’s orbital plane could shift, but that’s much harder than shifting the poles.

I can say this with confidence because the Earth’s axis does indeed shift direction! It does so without changing the angle between the celestial equator and ecliptic. Over the course of some 26,000 years the line of intersection shifts through a full 360 degrees. (And unlike almost everything else…it goes clockwise.) The first point of Aries precesses and the line points to the two equinoxes, so this is precession of the equinoxes.

If you are having trouble visualizing this, well, we’re both in luck. I found a good animation.

By about 30 seconds in you can see how it works.

The effect of this is to move the first point of Aries (represented with that symbol) around the ecliptic…which means it moves through the Zodiac. The first point of Aries was actually in Aries from about 2000 BCE to 1 CE, then it was in Pisces. It’s about to leave Pisces and shift into Aquarius (“the Age of Aquarius” actually means something…but nothing magic here).

As the first point of Aries moves, the Earth’s axis draws a cone through space, scribing circles on the celestial sphere centered on the ecliptic poles.

There are two other effects of this.

First off, it mucks up both equatorial and ecliptic coordinate systems, because the x axis, the primary axis…is moving! With ecliptic coordinates, you could probably just ignore this…and say we’re going to use the x axis direction from (say) 2000 and just leave it there. Big deal. The fundamental plane doesn’t change. Even if you let the X axis change, the Z axis does not, and you can just add or subtract a correction from ecliptic longitude and be current.

But this precession of the equinoxes absolutely hoses the equatorial coordinate system, because the fundamental plane itself shifts. And we can’t just go on using an old set of axes; the point of the equatorial system is so that you can be assured that if you set a telescope to a certain declination, it will stay at that declination as the earth rotates (even if you don’t have the telescope track whatever you’re looking at). So we issue new charts every fifty years ago, epoch 1950, epoch 2000; with all star coordinates shifted. At some point we will need to switch to something newer–or perhaps they’ll just let computers do the work of listing coordinates according to where the equinoxes are right now.

The other effect is on our year. Just like we have sidereal and solar days, the first being one rotation as seen from the stars, the other being one rotation as seen from the Sun, we have sidereal and tropical years.

A sidereal year is how long it takes for Earth to return to the same spot in its orbit, as seen from far away, in the stars (a sort of “God’s Eye View” of the situation). But our calendar does not track the stars, it tracks the seasons, and the interval between two crossings of the March equinox is called the “tropical year.” We set our calendar up so that the average length of a year (in whole days) is as close to one tropical year as possible. Otherwise, our calendar shifts with respect to the seasons. (We had trouble with that while following the “every four years is a leap year” rule. The calendar would slip against the seasons about 3 days every four hundred years. So we changed the calendar to drop three leap years out of every four centuries. The old schema is called the “Julian calendar” while the new one is the “Gregorian calendar”, each named after the person who instituted the system.)

A calendar year is the interval between one equinox and the next time we’re at that equinox, not (quite) the amount of time it takes for the sun to (apparently) return to the exact same place in the sky.

Actually since a calendar year is a whole number of days, we want the average length of a calendar year to be equal to the amount of time it takes to return to the same equinox (or solstice).

Since, as seen from either the north celestial pole or the north ecliptic pole, the Earth orbits counterclockwise but the equinoxes shift slowly clockwise, the effect is that one tropical year elapses just before the Earth can finish a full orbit with respect to the stars. How much before? About 1,224.5 seconds faster, roughly 20 minutes, 24.5 seconds. You can estimate the exact amount of time it will take the equinoxes to precess by dividing the number of seconds in a sidereal year by 1,224.5 and you get 25,772 years–which invariably gets rounded to 26,000 when you see this talked about in science popularizations. And this makes sense because it happens that the rate itself does vary; it’s not always 1,224.5 seconds per sidereal year.

13,000 years or so from now, Earth will be on the other side of its orbit when springtime hits the Northern hemisphere…but even though the Earth will be on the other side of its orbit, it will still be called March 21, because the calendar tracks the seasons, not the stars.

Speaking Of Earth

Go back through my series of articles on planets, moons, comets, asteroids and the Sun, and it appears I left one thing out, something fairly high up on the list.

The sixth largest body in the solar system.

Yep. I never talked about the third round rock from the Sun, Earth.

I picked that picture because it was taken from the Galileo space probe. The one that went to Jupiter. Before it got to Jupiter, it played gravity assist pinball, getting a boost from Venus then two assists from Earth. It was the first interplanetary probe to return to Earth (though it didn’t linger).

It also took pictures of the Simpson desert in Australia and the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica (the latter is a mosaic assembled from smaller images).

It was useful to see how Galileo’s cameras would behave taking pictures of a known target.

And the Earth is well known; we’ve been stomping around on it for millennia.

So: the basics.

Earth has a radius of 6,371 kilometers. (Try to take so much as one orbital dynamics class without having that number burned into your brain by the time of the final exam.) That is an average. Through the poles, it’s 6356.752 kilometers, through the equator, it’s 6378.137 kilometers. The mean density is 5.513 grams per cubic centimeter…and that is a record for any round body in the solar system. (Metallic asteroids will be higher of course.) It even beats out Mercury which has a large (for its size) core.

Density is useful for helping to figure out what something is made of. A lot of those outer planet moons have very low densities, indicating they’re mostly ice; others have slightly higher densities, indicating they’re more rock than ice…and so on. A typical rock has a density of about 3, and ice is just below 1.

I’ve often talked about the average density of different bodies in the solar system, and you may have wondered how we could possibly know this. It’s not as if we’ve sampled Earth at all depths, much less any of the other bodies we’ve only flown by once.

It turns out we can know this, relatively easily in fact. The average density of some planet or moon is its mass, divided by its volume, so we need to know two other things to get the density. Volume is easy: once you have a radius, r, you can compute the volume of the object via (4/3)πr³. Mass is a little trickier, but we can get most of the way there if something is in orbit around the body. The orbital speed for a circular orbit is v = √(μ/R). Since we’re after the mass, let’s rearrange that a bit: v²R = μ This time R stands for the orbital radius (not the radius of the planet). That other letter, Greek mu (μ), is the gravitational parameter of the body–that’s different for every body. So if we know the distance between the satellite and its primary, and we time how long it takes to orbit (T), we can get the velocity readily (2πR/T). We can substitute into the first formula and get μ = 4π²R³/T² And then we have this “gravitational parameter” thingie, based totally on the orbital radius and the time it takes the satellite to orbit.

(Gravitational parameter is another thing we had burned into our brains…but at least I’ve managed to forget its value since then. I just looked it up, Earth’s gravitational parameter is 3.986 x 10¹⁴ m³/s². Except I was used to deal with kilometers per second, so I used 3.986 x 10⁵.

But we wanted mass. Well it turns out that μ is equal to the mass of the primary, M, times the gravitational constant, G. But that’s as far as we could go for about a hundred years; we could measure μ, but we actually had no idea what G was, so we couldn’t get from μ to M. In the late 1790s Henry Cavendish was able to measure the gravitational force between known masses, so this time, he knew the mass, and could compute G. As soon as he did that, every known value of μ, be it for Earth, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, could be used to compute a mass. So.

Earth is being orbited by the Moon, so we could do the calculations above and arrive at the total mass of the Earth, then divide by the volume. If a body didn’t have a satellite, though, we were SOL. So we found ourselves in the situation where we knew Uranus’s mass better than we knew the mass of Venus, even though Venus is much closer. Uranus has moons, Venus does not. And of course moons themselves didn’t have anything orbiting around them, so we couldn’t determine their masses, except in the case of our Moon, which is big enough to have a noticeable effect on the Earth.

Once we could send spacecraft out there, though, we could determine masses, by watching how much their trajectories bent as they flew by. That’s a hyperbolic orbit, and the formulae for it also contain μ.

So with Earth being far denser than typical rocks, what’s inside of it? One cause of higher density might just be that rocks deep down might compress some under the weight of the rocks above them, and we now know that this is part of it. But we still need Earth to be largely made of stuff quite a bit denser than average ol’ rocks.

And so we get something like this diagram (which is not to scale, the ocean and crust are drawn much too thick):

The liquid outer core and solid inner core are believed to be composed mostly of iron, with densities ranging from 9.9 to 13.1 grams/cubic centimeter. (Iron on the surface has a density of 7.874–clearly the iron in the core is compressed.) But given that we can’t drill down even to the mantle, much less down to the core, how do we know this? We can kind of guess that the innards are iron, since iron is very common in the universe (supernovas happen when stars try to fuse iron; the supernovas end up basically barfing the iron out into space). And we get meteorites consisting of mostly iron, to reinforce that. But liquid? How much?

That one’s a bit harder than computing average density. But the answer, in one word, is “seismology.”

If you think I’m just going to leave it there…you don’t know me very welly.

Seismic waves are waves through the solid material of Earth, resulting from earthquakes, volcanoes, movements of magma underground, and even man-made explosions. There are all sorts of different kinds of seismic waves, and different ways to divvy them up.

One is surface waves vs. Body waves. Surface waves travel along the surface of Earth, while body waves travel through the whole body of earth. Surface waves will tend to get weaker in proportion to distance, while body waves will get weaker in proportion to distance squared. (There’s a good intuitive reason for this. Think about a surface wave traveling away from its source ten kilometers. The entire energy of the wave is contained along a circle 2π x 10 km in circumference. Wait for the wave to reach a 20 km distance, all of the energy is distributed along 2π x 20 km of line. Twice as much, so the wave will be half as strong. Body waves travel outwards along consistent hemispheres, not circles, and the hemisphere’s area multiplies by four when the radius doubles.)

Body waves, in turn, come in two types: P (or primary) waves, and S (or secondary) waves. These names come from the fact that the P waves move faster, so they reach seismographs first. Below is an example, the P wave hits, then the S wave.

The two types are fundamentally different. P waves are longitudinal…which means that the medium the wave is traveling through moves in the same direction the wave is moving. This is very much the way sound works; the sound wave consists of denser and less dense atmosphere and the air molecules move towards and away from the sound source to build up bands of compression and rarefaction. Below is a diagram of a longitudinal wave traveling from left to right.

I said they are much like sound waves, and in fact when a P wave reaches the surface, it will often make a noise. Travel speeds are 330 m/s in air, 1450 m/s in water and 5000 m/s in granite.

Secondary waves are transverse (like light waves).

They take roughly 1.7 times as long to cover the same distance as a P wave, and there is one other key difference: They don’t go through fluids. P waves do but they will bend. In fact both will curve when the density of the medium changes (this is another example of refraction).

So we can glean some information about what’s inside the Earth just by looking at how seismometers in different parts of the world react to strong earthquakes. S waves never show up more than 103 degrees away from the epicenter of an earthquake, beyond that, you are in the S wave “shadow”–a shadow cast by a liquid layer deep inside the Earth. P waves have a much complex shadow pattern, as seen below, caused by an abrupt bend in the wave at the core boundary. The core doesn’t stop P waves, but it does bend them sharply.

So we know we have a liquid core outer core. How do we know what it’s made of? It does cause Earth’s magnetic field so we know it’s a metal. Meteorites (which came off other bodies of the solar system) come in many different types but occasionally one will show up that is almost pure metal, and that will be roughly 90 percent iron, ten percent nickel. (In fact the meteor that created the Barringer or “Meteor” crater in Arizona was an iron-nickel type.)

So that’s the beginning of how we know what’s inside there. We get the occasional mantle rock brought up by geologic processes, too.

[It just occurred to me this is another bit of evidence for a globe shaped earth. S wave shadows exist. Plot them on a globe, and compare to the origin of the waves. Then do the same on the flat earth disc. Which of the two patterns is symmetric and simple to explain, and which is just some random-seeming curve-bounded area with no obvious physical explanation? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else bring this up.]

I’m going to leave it there.

“But Steve, you skipped over Earth in your series on the planets, and this is all we get?”

You proceed from a false premise. This isn’t part of the series on the planets and moons and other stuff in our Solar System. That series is over.

This is the first part of a new series, on geology. There will be more, lots more.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

This post is scheduled to go “live” at 10:01PM MST on Friday, November 15, 2024. That’s 00:01 EST on Saturday, November 16, 2024 for those of you in that benighted timezone near the Atlantic Ocean.

As of that moment, there are 65 days, 11 hours, and 59 minutes until our rightful President of the United States is restored to office.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

After the first release, we were supposed to get more, every week.

As far as I know it hasn’t happened.

Speaker Johnson, please follow through!

A Caution

Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.

State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,684.50
Silver $31.35
Platinum $979.00
Palladium $1,014.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 128.863-
Gold:Silver 85.630-

This week, markets closed at 3PM Mountain Time Friday for the weekend.

Gold $2,563.30
Silver $30.30
Platinum $947.00
Palladium $974.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 123.000-
Gold:Silver 84.597+

There’s no sugar coating it…the precious metals except for platinum are taking a beating. (Platinum was already on sale anyway.) Silver at least didn’t take quite as much of a beating as gold. The FRNSI, when I calculated it, turned out to be 122.9996 which rounds up to 123.000, which is why it looks suspiciously “round” at the moment. (Like the time twenty years or so ago when I bought a bunch of random things, and the total at the cash register, including sales tax, was exactly $100.00. I told the cashier to get the machine checked.)

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Neptune

We now reach the last full planet. But is it the end of the road?

History

Neptune’s discovery was a triumph of Newtonian theory.

Newton in the mid-late 1600s was pondering the forces that make the planets move, as opposed to forces we see on Earth. Apparently he saw an apple fall (it did not bonk him on the noggin), and it occurred to him that the force that made the apple fall might be the same force that makes the Moon orbit the Earth. Newton knew how far away the Moon was, he knew how much it would have to accelerate to remain in its orbit about the Earth. (If there was no acceleration, it would just go in a straight line and eventually disappear from sight from becoming too faint to see.) He also knew how far he and the apple were from the center of the Earth, and already knew how fast the apple accelerated.

He was able to determine that if the acceleration induced by gravity dropped off as the square of the distance, the number for the Moon’s distance actually matched what the Moon was doing.

Twenty years later after a lot of refining and elaboration, well…For the first time we knew that the stuff “up there” follows the same rules as the stuff “down here.” It’s not a special realm, as the ancients believed.

Newton did not discover gravity. Gravity was known to Og the caveman especially after he did a faceplant tripping over something while chasing game, nor was Og the first to notice it. What Newton did do was to show that gravity is universal, it applies everywhere not just here on Earth. And he was able to write equations that described it quite accurately.

Newton, during those 20 years, had gone on to prove that such a force would cause things to orbit other things in ellipses…which matched what we already knew; Johannes Kepler had in the early 1600s proved with meticulously collected data spanning decades and years of his own skull sweat that the orbits of the planets around the Sun (and the Moon around the Earth) were ellipses. Newton also was able to show that Kepler’s other two laws of planetary motion applied. Better, one could apply his laws to the Galilean moons (as well as Titan orbiting Saturn) and show that they, too followed Newtonian mechanics and gravity.

Over the next decades astronomers refined their data on the planets and had more and more accurate data to “plug into” their equations and predicting where planets and the Moon would be became an exact science; instead of being off by five degrees (the width of you three big fingers (not the thumb and not the pinky) held at arms length), we were much less than half a degree.

Then Uranus was discovered in 1781, and that was one more thing to track on top of the other planets, known moons of planets, and so on. (Starting in 1650, we discovered binary stars orbiting each other and could track them too.) Alexis Bouvard published tables of Uranus’s ephemerides (predictions of future predctions) in 1821.

Except there was a problem, one which became apparent over the next few decades (it takes a long time, when the planet has an 84 year orbital period or “year”). Uranus was being an ass…not behaving. It was traveling too fast for a while…then too slow.

Was Newton wrong after all? In spite of his stuff having worked so well for over a century?

Bouvard didn’t think so. He speculated that some unknown body was perturbing Uranus’s orbit, pulling on it and either making it speed up or slow down, depending on where it was in relation to Uranus. In 1843 John Couch Adams began trying to figure out where this unknown body was, and by 1845-6 had generated several predictions; he was continually refining them because his method was iterative. He’d guess, run the numbers, adjust his guess, and repeat. Then repeat again.

But Adams had competition; Urbain Le Verrier was also working on the problem. He came up with similar answers. The Astronomer Royal of England, Sir George Airy, persuaded James Challis to actually look through a telescope and try to find the planet. Challis tried through August and September 1846, and failed. (However he realized much later that he had actually seen it a couple of times in July and August 1845 (a year before his search) and not recognized it for what it was, because he had poor observing techniques and old star charts. D’oh!)

Le Verrier wasn’t going to wait on the Brits to get their act together; he wrote to Johan Gottfried Galle in Berlin, and asked him to look. Galle received the lettter on the 23rd of September, 1846. Heinrich d’Arrest, a student at the observatory, pointed out that they had just made a chart of that part of the sky recently. So all Galle had to do was point his telescope and look for something that wasn’t on the chart. That would be a moving object…a planet. Galle looked that evening with a nine inch refractor telescope (one with lenses at both ends of the tube), and found it almost immediately, less than a degree away from where Le Verrier had said it would be, and twelve degrees away from Adam’s prediction. However…the old chart could just be missing the object by mistake. Galle looked at the object over the next few days and satisfied himself that it wasn’t a mistake. It was indeed a moving object.

Another planet had been found!

Newton in trouble? No way! This was actually a triumph for Newtonian mechanics because it had been used to find a planet!

(As a footnote…Galileo saw Neptune, diagrammed its position in his notes, not once but twice when it was near Jupiter on 28 December 1612 and 27 January 1613 [both dates New Style] but didn’t realize it was a moving object. So, although interesting, it isn’t enough to give him credit for the discovery. However, “In 2009, a study suggested that Galileo was at least aware that the “star” he had observed had moved relative to fixed stars.” [From Wikipedia])

Voyager 2, 25 August 1989

This is a collection of official NASA animations depicting the sole spacecraft encounter (so far) with Neptune. These videos were made before the encounter, so Neptune’s and Triton’s appearances are just guesses. They also show the rings as arcs, because that’s what they thought back then (it turns out that they’re full rings, with some thicker sections we mistook for partial arcs).

Basic Info

For a while, it was simply called “the planet exterior to Uranus” or “Le Verrier’s Planet”. Galle suggested calling it Janus, which fortunately didn’t happen or it would be confused with the Hugh Janus of the solar system. Le Verrier said, since he had discovered it, he should be able to name it and he suggested “Neptune.” And that’s the name that ultimately “stuck.” The planet had a bluish tinge and Neptune was the Roman god of the sea (corresponding to the Greek Poseidon).

Neptune orbits the Sun in 164.8 years, almost twice as long as Uranus (84.02 years). Its average distance from the sun is 30.07 AUs (30.07 times as much as Earth’s average disance). That puts it at 4.5 billion kilometers from the Sun. That means that radio signals to and from Voyager 2 took over four hours each way!

Here it is in true color, with the Earth photoshopped in for comparison.

It’s roughly the same size as Uranus…just a bit smaller, but it is considerably denser than Uranus and notably more massive (Uranus is 14.536 times the mass of the Earth, Neptune is 17.147 times.)

Neptune rotates in 16 hours, 6 minutes; that’s its day. Its axis is tilted 28.2 degrees, a bit more than Earth’s but not ridiculous like with Uranus or Venus. The temperature is 55-72 Kelvins (-218 to -201 C) depending on how deep into the atmosphere you measure it. The latter number is measured where the atmospheric pressure is the same as Earth’s at sea level. The atmosphere consists of 80 percent hydrogen, 19 percent helium and 1.5 percent methane by volume, with traces of ethane, ammonia, water ice, and ammonium hydrosulfide. The methane gives Neptune its bluish tinge.

Innards

Deeper down the methane, ammonia and water ices become more prevalent, earning Neptune its place among the ice giants. One thing I just spotted is the speculation that at a depth of 7000km, methane might decompose with the carbon forming diamond crystals that rain downwards like hailstones; this would be true on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus as well.

You’re probably used to seeing this picture of Neptune:

But if you scroll back to the earlier picture, it’s the same picture of Neptune, just rendered in different colors. This one exaggerated the colors for contrast, and in it you can see the “Great Dark Spot” which means I can now segue to discussing the weather.

Weather

The “Great Dark Spot” is similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. It’s 13,000km x 6,600 km or so…which means that measured the long way it’s slightly broader than Earth! However, it wasn’t nearly as permanent as the Red Spot. By the time Hubble looked at Neptune eight years later in 1994, it was gone. But a new dark spot had appeared in Neptune’s northern hemisphere.

The white smudge is called “Scooter” because it moved more rapidly than the Great Dark Spot

Neptune has the most extreme winds in the solar system…at least, as far as we can tell. The prevailing winds on the equator are 400 m/s, dropping to a “mere” 250 m/s at the poles. In the storms the velocity can reach 600 m/s. That’s roughly 2,200 kph or 1,300 mph, well over the speed of sound. This is a stark contrast to Uranus, which had no obvious storms when Voyager 2 flew by. The concentration of methane, ethane, and acetylene at the equator is 100 times that at the poles, so it seems that at the equator the atmosphere is upwelling, bringing that stuff from down deeper where it is more common. It subsides near the poles.

Neptune, like Uranus, has a multi pole magnetic field, indicating its dynamo is probably in a relatively thin layer of the planet–much as is thought with Uranus.

Rings

Neptune has rings, but not very substantial ones. In this case it’s likely to be tiny ice particles coated with carbon-based material. And here, we came up with cool names: the most important rings are named Adams, Le Verrier, and Galle. The best way to view them is in infrared..and well guess what we just put up there that sees really, really well in infrared?

None other than the James Webb Space Telescope, of course!

Before the Voyager 2 encounter, we thought the rings were partial arcs rather than full circles; we eventually figured out those arcs were actually thicker parts of full rings.

And what a nice segue into the moons, since we can see some of them here.

Moons

You might expect the same progression of small, inner moons, nice and regular in circular orbits, then major moons (either large and planetary sized, or medium or medium-small but still round, or a mix), also in nice tidy regular orbits, then irregular satellites, that we saw with Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Surely with a pattern like this three times running, we can expect more of the same here?

You might expect it, but that ain’t what you’re gonna get!

Neptune has 16 known moons, with a naming theme of water deities and one water critter out of Greek mythology.

First we have seven small regular satellites…in other words, inner moons. Some of them orbit among Neptune’s rings, as seen in the JWST photo above. Five of them were discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989, and of course the best photos we have of any of them are from that spacecraft, the only one ever to visit Neptune. Larissa was actually discovered in 1981, while Hippocamp was first spotted in 2013.

The largest of these is Proteus, with a diameter of 420 km. That puts it in the same size range as Mimas and Miranda, those smallest round moons, but it’s not round! It’s more like Hyperion in that regard, but unlike Hyperion, it’s not a gigantic sponge.

It is remarkable Proteus was discovered well after Larissa (which is much smaller) and Nereid, which is also smaller and has been known for decades–we’ll get to that.

So far so good, right? Inner moons.

Next should be large, planetary-sized moons and/or medium moons, all nice and regular.

Well, we do get a large moon. But it’s not regular. Not even close!

Triton is 2,705 km (give or take about 5 km) orbiting at 352,759 km in 5.87 days. It’s in a nice circular equatorial orbit…but it’s not in Neptune’s equatorial plane; it’s inclined at 23 degrees. Well, no, actually, it’s inclined at 157 degrees. Yes, it’s retrograde.

What the Biden is going on here? We’ll come back to that. And we’ll hit Triton in more detail shortly. Meanwhile, I’ll point out that it was discovered weeks after Neptune itself, by the English astronomer William Lassell.

Next out is Nereid, discovered in 1949 by Gerard Peter Kuiper (you may recall I warned you that you’d be seeing his name again! And I wasn’t thinking about this when I said so). Nereid is 357 km across (give or take 13 km), and another non-round, but medium small moon. And now we see the suckage we have to deal with when only one spacecraft has ever spent any time at all near Neptune, and that only a few hours. Here is our absolute best picture of Nereid (out of 83 that Voyager took):

Nereid is another one of those “medium small” moons that didn’t quite become rounded. It got discovered before Proteus (which is larger) because it has a high albedo, reflecting most of the light that hit it.

And Nereid’s orbit is wacky. Its average distance from Neptune is 5,513,900 km–a huge jump up from Triton (it takes 360 days to orbit Neptune). But it’s at a relatively sane inclination of 5 degrees…very small for an irregular moon. But here’s the big surprise: the eccentricity is a whopping 0.75! That’s extremely elliptical. Its closest approach to Neptune is 1,381,500 km and its furthest distance is 9,626,500 km.

Next out is Halimede, about 62 km across, at 16,590,500 km, orbiting in 1879 days (almost five years), it’s retrograde and has an eccentricity of 0.521. It looks like it’s made out of the same stuff as Nereid, and there’s a 41 percent chance that at sometime in the past, it actually collided with Nereid. Or rather, that it broke off of Nereid (when you “run that tape backwards” that looks like a collision).

There are then two groups of three, the Sao group (inclined 36-50 degrees) and the Neso group (inclined 127-135 degrees), all of them 25-60km in diameter.

Halimede on out are clearly outer, irregular moons so here at least the usual pattern fits.

OK, we’ve got some crazy stuff going on here.

Triton

There are seven “large” or “planetary sized” moons in our Solar System (the Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan and Triton) and Triton is the smallest of them. It’s the only moon in the Solar System with a diameter in the 2,000-3,000 km range. Even so, it’s larger than all of the smaller moons in the Solar System, put together.

Before Voyager 2 flew by, we knew very little about Triton; Kuiper tried to measure its diameter in 1954 (well over a century after its discovery) and got 3,800 km. Others got values anywhere from 2500 to 6000km; that last is almost half the diameter of Earth and would have made Triton the largest moon in the solar system, beating out even Ganymede. The answer turned out to be 2706 km as measured by Voyager 2 on August 25, 1989.

Triton has a density of about 2 grams per cubic centimeter, which indicates that unlike many moons of the outer solar system, it’s more rock than ice. Its surface temperature is 38 K (-235C), slightly colder than Hitlary Klinton’s lap.

In the 1990s an atmosphere was detected (by watching stars fade as Triton passed in front of them). This is a very thin atmosphere, 0.02 millibar at most (Earth’s atmosphere is close to 1013 millibars). Nonetheless, clouds were photographed by Voyager (look at the horizon)

And also in this picture, a “parting shot” at Triton from the opposite side from the Sun (backlit pictures like this one can be very useful when studying atmospheres):

Triton also has geysers, this time of nitrogen. Triton is cold enough to have nitrogen ice on it (and remember that liquid nitrogen is stereotypically very cold stuff), but below the surface it’s warmer and you can have nitrogen geysers. The black smudges are thought to be downwind of them.

And finally we have this picture of the south polar ice cap (yes, “upside down” with south at the top):

Away from the cap we see more cantaloupe terrain. This feature is unique to Triton, so far as we know, and consists mostly of dirty water ice. They might be caused by lumps of less-dense material slowly rising to the surface, or perhaps flooding from cryovulcanism.

What’s with the red color? We’ve seen this a lot and it’s time I discussed it a bit. All of these outer moons have some amount of hydrocarbons on them (especially Titan), things like methane, ethane, and so forth. There’s zero protection from ultraviolet light on any of these moons (except maybe Titan), so the UV acts on the hydrocarbons and any sulfur that’s around and produces tholins, which are pretty much random goo formed of polymers. The term tholin was coined by Carl Sagan, who wrote:

For the past decade we have been producing in our laboratory a variety of complex organic solids from mixtures of the cosmically abundant gases CH₄, C₂H₆, NH₃, H₂O, HCHO, and H₂S [methane, ethane, ammonia, water, formaldehyde and hydrogen sulfide, respectively–SteveInCO]. The product, synthesized by ultraviolet (UV) light or spark discharge, is a brown, sometimes sticky, residue, which has been called, because of its resistance to conventional analytical chemistry, “intractable polymer”. […] We propose, as a model-free descriptive term, ‘tholins’ (Greek Θολός, muddy; but also Θόλος, vault or dome), although we were tempted by the phrase ‘star-tar’.^[3][1]

We’ve only seen 40 percent of Triton, because that’s what Voyager photographed as it sped by. The other side might very well be a gigantic billboard reading “For a Good Time Call…” with Kamala Harris’s phone number, for all we know.

Here’s a geological map of Triton, based on what we have seen.

Triton orbits closer to Neptune than the Moon does to Earth, yet it is highly inclined and retrograde. Its orbit is nearly circular, and it has become tidally locked to Neptune (as would be expected).

Earth’s moon is slowly receding from Earth at a few centimeters per year. Triton is getting closer. In fact, in about three and a half billion years, it will probably get close enough to Neptune that tidal forces will pull it apart and we’ll have an absolutely killer set of rings to admire. (Book your travel plans now!)

But why is it getting closer to Neptune, when our Moon is getting further from Earth? Let’s look at why our Moon is getting further from Earth. It’s both raising and pulling at our tidal bulges, and our tidal bulges are pulling on the moon. The bulges precede the moon (because the rotation of the Earth shoves them ahead of where they “should” be directly under the Moon), which means the moon is pulling back on them and slowing the rotation of the Earth (which is why we keep having to add leap seconds). Conversely the bulges pull the Moon forward and cause it to speed up in its orbit. Speeding up raises the orbit. The Moon slowly recedes.

The same thing happens with Neptune and Triton…except that now the tidal bulges try to pull Triton “forward” in its orbit…but Triton is moving backward in its orbit, so pulling it forward actually cancels part of the backwards motion and slows Triton down. So, slowly but surely Triton’s orbit gets smaller and smaller.

OK So What Happened That Left This Trainwreck?

Neptune’s moon system is radically different from the others. There’s simply no way Triton could have formed where it did.

Astronomers are fairly certain that Triton is actually a captured object. And when it was captured, it wreaked havoc with the rest of Neptune’s moon system. Nereid, for instance is either also a captured object, or got put into its oddball orbit by Triton during the capture–if so it’s probably the only original Neptunian regular moon that survived, though it’s not regular any more. Any other moon that Neptune had at the time is long gone.

Adding to the pile of evidence for Triton being captured: it turns out to have a very similar chemical composition to Pluto, suggesting that they formed near each other.

Another Visit?

Will we ever visit Neptune again? Obviously the next step is an orbiter. Multiple concepts, both orbiters and more flybys, have been proposed and rejected. There’s some thought of doing things under the New Frontiers program, perhaps orbiters that would spend a lot of time on Triton, but these would be launching in 2031 or 2041 and arriving in 2047 and 2056 (note the fifteen or sixteen year travel times!). I’ll be a geezer by 2056; older than my parents lived. Failing that, the Chinese might put something at Neptune by 2058. So it looks like, not in my lifetime.

Neptune, the Mystic

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) composed an orchestral suite called The Planets in 1914-1917, with movements for Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. (It’s one of the few “classical” works from the 20th century that I like.) Although he tried to evoke the mythological figures the planets are named after, I find the Neptune movement evocative of the vast distance that Neptune is, and its extreme isolation.

The slow fading out makes one think of journeying off into the stupendous void that is beyond Neptune.

The sun is 30 times further away from Neptune than it is from Earth. It’s half a degree across as seen from earth (30 minutes of arc), which means it’s one minute of arc across at Neptune. It looks the size of a quarter at 100 yards. No wonder it gives such little warmth, 1/900th of what it gives to us. And also the same tiny fraction of light. Cold and Dark, and it’s hard to imagine it getting colder and darker. Surely we are at the corner of “no” and “where.”

And yet, though we are out of planets, we are not done.