Kreationistit kumoavat vanhan Maan

Tai sitten eivät kumoa. Kreationismi-sivusto http://www.icr.org/ on taas ottanut etusivunsa aiheeksi himmeän nuoren Auringon paradoksin, joka sivuston mukaan edelleen haastaa Maan iän.

Laskelmien mukaan nuori Aurinko oli niin himmeä, ettei sen säteily olisi riittänyt pitämään vettä sulana maapallolla, mutta geologiset todisteet osoittavat, että sulaa vettä oli jo pari sataa miljoonaa vuotta maapallon syntymisen jälkeen. Tämän ongelman muotoili tähtitieteilijä ja tieteenkansantajuistaja Carl Sagan yhdessä George Mullenin kanssa vuonna 1972.

Kreationismi-sivustolla kerrotaan näin;

"As researcher Dr. Ray Burgess from the University of Manchester said, "The amount of nitrogen in the [supposed ancient] atmosphere was too low to enhance the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide sufficiently to warm the planet."2 In fact, the study even showed that the so-called ancient atmosphere contained slightly less than today's levels of atmospheric nitrogen, making the "faint young sun paradox" even more perplexing to those committed to a billion-year history."

http://www.icr.org/article/7734/

Mikä tässä sitten mättää? No se, että tekstiä on taas lainauslouhittu, jolloin Burgessin sanoma vääristyy täysin.

"Dr Burgess added: “The amount of nitrogen in the atmosphere was too low to enhance the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide sufficiently to warm the planet. However, our results did give a higher than expected pressure reading for carbon dioxide – at odds with the estimates based on fossil soils – which could be high enough to counteract the effects of the faint young Sun and will require further investigation.”

Tämä oli siis oikea lainaus täältä; http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=10798

Tämän lisäksi kesällä julkaistu tutkimus, jossa supertietoneella tehdyt mallinnukset todennäköisesti osoittavat jo aikaisemmin spekuloidut ratkaisut ongelmaan oikeiksi.

Mallinnuksen mukaan vulkaanisen toiminnan synnyttämät hiilidioksi- ja metaanikaasut tiettyinä pitoisuuksina riittivät pitämään veden sulana osassa maapalloa.

"Even if half of Earth's surface was below freezing back in the Archean and half was above freezing, it still would have constituted a habitable planet since at least 50 percent of the ocean would have remained open," said Wolf. "Most scientists have not considered that there might have been a middle ground for the climate of the Archean.

"The leap from one-dimensional to three-dimensional models is an important step," said Wolf. "Clouds and sea ice are critical factors in determining climate, but the one-dimensional models completely ignore them."

Has the faint young sun paradox finally been solved? "I don't want to be presumptuous here," said Wolf. "But we show that the paradox is definitely not as challenging as was believed over the past 40 years. While we can't say definitively what the atmosphere looked like back then without more geological evidence, it is certainly not a stretch at all with our model to get a warm early Earth that would have been hospitable to life."

"The Janus supercomputer has been a tremendous addition to the campus, and this early Earth climate modeling project would have impossible without it," said Toon. The researchers estimated the project required roughly 6,000 hours of supercomputer computation time, an effort equal to about 10 years on a home computer."

http://phys.org/news/2013-07-early-earth-life.html

Kreationisteilla ei onneksi ole hätää;

"Creation scientists do not wrestle with this paradox, because the sun, planets, and Earth are all young and were created whole.4 Solar radiation on Day Four of the creation week, near the beginning of time itself, was not much different from today and perfectly suited for life—an explanation that frees scientists from this unnecessary conundrum."

Vaikka tuo yksi kohta onkin lainauslouhittu, niin kreationistit kuitenkin mainitsevat asiasta myöhemmin näin;

"While the study authors point to a slight chance that the high carbon dioxide (CO2) pressures they found in the gaseous rocks might have helped sufficiently warm the earth, no conclusive research has yet proven this point."

Ei olekaan, mutta geologiset todisteet yhdessä supertietokoneella tehdyn mallinnuksen kanssa antavat vahvan viitteen siihen, että "faint young sun paradox" on saamassa ratkaisunsa, vaikka se teille niin rakas yksittäinen "todiste" olikin maapallon vanhaa ikää vastaan.