Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

rivalarrival t1_j5nyfgo wrote

Reply to comment by theredhype in What are the forces on Earth’s Inner Core that change its speed? by BayRunner

The relationship between temperature and pressure does not work the way you are describing. A substance is not at a given temperature just because it is at a given pressure. Pressurize one cylinder of nitrogen to 30PSI, and another cylinder of nitrogen to 3000PSI. Leave them alone in a room for awhile, and they will both become room temperature.

The temperature of a given mass is not dependent on its static pressure, but on changes to its pressure.

You are (effectively) arguing that adiabatic heating is responsible for the heat of the earth's core. To make this argument, you will have to show that the earth's volume is shrinking, or otherwise demonstrate that the pressure at the core is not just high, but increasing.

Without a pressure change, we need to look at the heat entering or exiting the system. The simple fact is that relative to the total amount of heat within them, very little heat actually leaves the core and mantle. At the current rate of dissipation, it will take billions of years to remove a significant amount of that heat.

10

Aethyx_ t1_j5nzzpz wrote

Following the analogy... Isn't it so that the earth was pressurised to a tremendous amount of psi, and is now in that process of cooling down to ambient temperature?

Of course many other processes play a role, but the pressurised can analogy kind of works if you scale it up?

1

rivalarrival t1_j5o6oem wrote

I don't know if adiabatic processes are responsible for the temperatures in the core, but if it is, it would be more accurate to describe this in the past tense, rather than the present tense that the other commenter used:

>"High pressure makes made the core hot"

You made the same distinction:

>the earth was pressurised

That being said, I doubt adiabatic heating plays a significant role. Adiabatic processes operate through compression, not pressurization.

Suppose I have a sealed tank of water. I put a balloon inside it. Then I pressurize the water to double the pressure in the tank. The volume of the balloon shrinks.

Here's the important part: Even though the balloon is half the size now, it still has the same amount of heat: none has entered or exited yet. The same amount of heat in a smaller volume means the temperature has risen. That's adiabatic heating.

Replace the balloon with an iron or nickel ball. When you double the pressure, the volume of the ball doesn't change. Increase the pressure a hundred times, a thousand times, it doesn't matter: the volume of the ball stays the same. The heat within the ball is not concentrated. There is no adiabatic process involved.

With the core of the earth being primarily comprised of non-compressible materials, I don't think adiabatic heating explains the temperature of the core.

3

Implausibilibuddy t1_j5o6ohb wrote

> the pressurised can analogy kind of works if you scale it up?

It did 4 billion years ago when the debris in our Sun's accretion disk coalesced to form our planet, and again when whatever planet sized object hit us to form our Moon, but since then we've been cooling off like a pot of old coffee. Fortunately there's a lot of mass left to cool off, and it's stored in the best Thermos ever created...

3