Reply to: Golden showers

[TimberWolf]

10^31 carat diamond found

A closer look reveals it to be an orb with the mass of Jupiter and about half as wide. Sensors indicate it's made of – wait, this can't be right – diamond! Your instruments don't lie. You've just stumbled upon a 1031-carat diamond.
Astrophile: The diamond as big as a planet - space - 25 August 2011 - New Scientist

[TimberWolf]

I think the problem comes mainly from the misrepresentation by the Mail. A 'late veneer' hypothesis seems hard to avoid unless asteroids were found not to contain heavy elements, which would be odd. A bit different from the Mail's "golden shower", more like same old shower.

Doodab's link to a better source also says that the new findings support another perhaps more interesting theory, one that I hadn't heard of anyway. That is, that the late bombardment caused the convection currents within the Earth that are still present today, billions of years later

In addition to explaining the distribution of precious metals within the Earth, these meteorite impacts could also explain how large-scale convection cells became established within the mantle. These rising and falling columns of molten magma are the driving force behind tectonics, causing crust to be created where magma upwells at mid-ocean ridges, and to be destroyed at subduction zones where colder magma sinks deep into the Earth's interior.

[doodab]

IS this world-class science? Apart from the sensationalism because it's the daily mail, is it that big a deal?

The actual research was published in Nature, not the Wail. It's not "about gold" per se. To say the mail have misrepresented it would itself be a misrepresentation. Probably more accurate to say they received their copy of Nature, skimmed the contents page, got distracted by something shiny, thought "we should write some utter bollocks about gold, people love that" typed "gold" into google, went to the pub and knocked out a quick 500 words after lunch.

The idea that there is a lot of gold in the Earth's core is not news. It's a well established idea and has been for a long time i.e. 30 years or more. The prevailing wisdom is that gold and other elements soluble in molten iron would have sunk to the Earth's core and hence should be much less abundant in the crust than they are. One (possibly the most widely accepted) explanation for the discrepancy is the "late veneer hypothesis" i.e the idea that the Earth was bombarded by meteorites containing relatively higher proportions of these elements later in it's life. It's also been advanced to account for the amount of water we have. These researchers didn't advance that hypothesis either. What this research has achieved is to measure the relative abundance of tungsten isotopes in some rocks to better than 6 ppm in order to determine if their composition provides evidence for or against the idea. Their results are significant because as well as agreeing with the predictions of the theory it seems they also count against several of the competing hypothesis.

They were unraveling the basic laws of reality, which have been directly responsible for about £10gazillion of industry. I don't think fundamental research and empirical analysis stroke detective work are quite in the same class.

That's a good point. It's a well known fact that Geology is an utterly pointless field of study and geologists have never done anything useful to industry like help locate water, oil or mineral deposits, and of course knowing how the earth came to be and what it's made of has no practical application to things like safeguarding water supplies, predicting earthquakes or helping us understand and predict what we might find on other terrestrial bodies. Definitely not worth bothering with.

[d000hg]

It's a sad indictment of the state of modern Britain when world class science is frowned upon as being useless because there is no immediate opportunity to exploit it for profit.

IS this world-class science? Apart from the sensationalism because it's gold, is it that big a deal?

No doubt James Clarke Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton et al would have been dismissed as a bunch of ***** pointlessly fannying about unless some way could have been found to make money out of them.

They were unraveling the basic laws of reality, which have been directly responsible for about £10gazillion of industry. I don't think fundamental research and empirical analysis stroke detective work are quite in the same class.

[doodab]

But where gold/platinum comes from does not matter.

Now if they found a way to mine more minerals then great. Or create more then great. But to speculate it comes from outer space....

It's a sad indictment of the state of modern Britain when world class science is frowned upon as being useless because there is no immediate opportunity to exploit it for profit. No doubt James Clarke Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton et al would have been dismissed as a bunch of ***** pointlessly fannying about unless some way could have been found to make money out of them. Perhaps all scientists should be forced to work under the spotlights as part of a reality TV show?

These people aren't "speculating" that precious metals came from outer space, that theory has already been advanced in order to explain why there is so much gold knocking about in accessible places as there should be a lot less. What they have done is advanced the state of the art in isotopic analysis and produced some fairly clear evidence to support that pre-existing theory.

Edit: Non daily wail report here: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/47116

[d000hg]

I forgot Carbon had another stable isotope . Makes sense.

[Cliphead]

How do they measure that? C14 dating isn't usable and even if it was, such techniques are based on the isotope balances found on Earth... if the material originates elsewhere things could be totally different.

Virtually all carbon on Earth comes from the stars. Studying the isotopic ratio of the carbon in a diamond makes it possible to trace the history of the carbon. For example, at the earth's surface the ratio of isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-13 is slightly different from that of star dust. Also, certain biological processes actively sort carbon isotopes according to mass, so the isotopic ratio of carbon that has been in living things is different from that of the Earth or the stars. Thus it is known that the carbon for most natural diamonds comes most recently from the mantle, but the carbon for a few diamonds is recycled carbon of microorganisms, formed into diamonds by the earth's crust via plate tectonics. Some minute diamonds that are generated by meteorites are from carbon available at the site of impact; some diamond crystals within meteorites are still fresh from the stars.

[d000hg]

Some diamonds to be found are older than the Earth, albeit very small.

How do they measure that? C14 dating isn't usable and even if it was, such techniques are based on the isotope balances found on Earth... if the material originates elsewhere things could be totally different.

[wobbegong]

Question - what would happen to price of gold on world markets if an all gold asteroid size of Moon shown below collides with this planet?

Nothing, we'd probably all be dead.

HTH

[BrilloPad]

Every atom on the planet came from outer space Shirley?

Crap story. 1/10

1/10 is quite good for the daily mail. I am suprised they haven't said that all the gold & platinum has been taken by asylum seekers.....

[BrilloPad]

Gold and platinum are both important to industry.

But where gold/platinum comes from does not matter.

Now if they found a way to mine more minerals then great. Or create more then great. But to speculate it comes from outer space....

[gingerjedi]

Every atom on the planet came from outer space Shirley?

Crap story. 1/10

[doodab]

Some scientists spout a load of nonsense - none of this stuff is provable and will probably be "proved" wrong in 10 years.

Can't they work on something useful to industry?

Gold and platinum are both important to industry.

[BrilloPad]

Some scientists spout a load of nonsense - none of this stuff is provable and will probably be "proved" wrong in 10 years.

Can't they work on something useful to industry?

[MarillionFan]

WMFS


Though I spell "disapointed" like this - disappointed

Austerity measures. We can't all take the p.