FROM THE WILDERNESS
Heat Also Rises
By James Strauss
I hold advanced degrees in both anthropology and physics. I think I have studied enough and traveled enough (122 countries) and dived deep enough (in every ocean and ‘sea’ on earth) to have some idea about what’s going on down there in the deepest of the depths. The world is experiencing the worst heat wave in its history and people are suffering and dying from the continuing wave. This is all being blamed on irresponsible, thoughtless and ignorant human interaction with the environment because of the burning of fossil fuels for energy, dumping plastic into the seas or worse. What about volcanos? Seventy-five percent of all active volcanoes on earth area at the bottom of the oceans. Those oceans are an average of two miles deep and cover nearly 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Fully sixty percent of all lava that is surfacing in hot liquid form is surfacing in these unfollowed volcanic eruptions.
These figures are all from NOAA, the weather and geologic organization respected all over the world for its knowledge and objectivity. The magma coming up out of the mantle comes at between 1300 and 2500 degrees. As opposed from eruptions up on land masses, those are distinctive, loud and earth-shattering in effect, these deep underwater eruptions are silent, covered over by ten thousand feet of very heavy water (a simple gallon weighs almost nine pounds). The pressure pushing down on the bottom of the oceans is truly amazing and significant, as was recently so tragically illustrated by what happened to the Titan submersible and its occupants. The underwater eruptions are silent and the magma coming out is immediately cooled by the icy sea water under terrific pressure. That means that the heat is absorbed and that heat has to be transferred somewhere. That heat is being transferred directly into the water surrounding the rising rivers of molten magma.
Most everyone, at one time or another, has seen television video of hot water vents spewing rather narrow columns of hot water upward from the not so deep depths. Many animals have surrounded these hot spots, located on the shallower ocean bottoms, and made a life in the growth-giving life the hot water differential promotes. Those vents emit water that’s only about a couple of hundred degrees in temperature. That’s not the case for the heated silent monsters of the deep, pouring hot magma up and into the sea bottoms at thousands of degrees over vast stretches of those parts of the ocean bottom that lay along broken trenches established between the many continental, and always shifting, plates.
Even detecting these eruptions way down there is difficult, to say the least. What to do about them is easier. Nothing. That’s right, there’s nothing any human or collection of humans can do to stop or in any way interfere with this continuing process. Therefore, and this is a big one, there’s no point in the authorities informing the public about what’s going on. Much better if the public thinks that there’s something that can be done and then goes to work to do it, like building windmills, becoming vegans eschewing air-conditioning and so much more. According to Nature Journal, another highly respected scientific magazine: “Warmer temperatures than today, over a period spanning millennia, most recently occurred in the Last Interglacial period, about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago.”
How much warmer than right now this summer? How about ten to fifteen degrees, and there was no mankind around in any developed form to influence the warming whatsoever. It becomes likely, in looking at that data, collected from the caves in the Swiss Alps, that America has a period of warming ahead of it and that we citizens better get prepared and spend our money accommodating and working to survive the effects that are now coming and will continue to come for some time.
