Reply To: Animated nuclear reaction.

[texaslabrat]

I know I said I wouldn’t teach the unwilling..but seeing such misguided scientific lack of knowledge on this board bothers me for some reason. So here goes.

The heat flux out of the earth is known to be around 44TW (look it up). This should help get you started:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=4uV&q=heat+flux+out+of+earth+44tw&aq=f&oq;=&aqi;=

For tidal forces to be responsible for this, the earth would need to be losing rotational energy at the rate of *at least* 44TW as tidal friction is a consequence of trading rotational energy for heat and orbital acceleration (of the moon with respect to the earth, and of the earth with respect to the sun). Unfortunately for your “theory”, the earth is not losing rotational energy at this rate…rather it is losing rotational energy at roughly 4TW (the exact number is complicated to compute due to not-quite-spherical shape and non-uniform composition plus the un-flattening of the poles which tends to increase the speed of rotation while the frictional forces slows it down…but the rough number with a spherical assumption is good enough to show order of magnitude). There are on-going gravimetric satellite-based surveys which keep track of these issues. Much of that is explained (with citations) here:
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:-gk-ok_CbiUJ:eprints.ictp.it/165/01/moon.ps+earth+loss+rotational+energy&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

As for comparing the Moon’s tidal influence on Earth vs Jupiter on Io…..ROFL. That’s like saying because they both contain water that my swimming pool is just like Lake Superior. They aren’t even in the same zip code in the strength of effects. As an example…Io’s rocky surface rises and falls *100 meters* due to the tidal forces from Jupiter. Compare this with the few-meter (at most) motion of *water* on earth coupled with the centi-meter scale of solid surface movement. And these effects are spread throughout the earth’s structure rather than being concentrated in the core with the lion’s share at the surface. Now, if you were talking 2 billion or so years ago when the earth was rotating much faster and the moon was much closer…then yeah, tidal heating was a significant player. But it’s been a very long time since tidal forces competed with radiogenic ones for the heating of the core and subsequent thermal flux out of the earth.

And as for volcanism on Venus…plate tectonics plays a huge role in volcanism, and on Earth water plays a huge role in plate tectonics. Since Venus doesn’t have large oceans…well, you do the math. At this point, we don’t know enough about Venus to make conclusions and most of our theories regarding its internal structure are educated guesses. Given its retrograde rotation and other “weird” aspects, I’d be careful about trying to make apples-to-apples comparisons with Earth.