OneGuyFromBarlick

I don't have one of these in my mineral collection!...
`The Enigma: Mysterious black diamond up for auction' BBC
See also Wikipedia: Carbonado

Never heard of one of those Peter....

This had me looking up more on the Moon's atmosphere - I know it's gravity is one-sixth of the Earth's but does it have any atmosphere at all? I find that it has almost none, a million times less than Earth's. So probably no chance of the rocket part burning up, it will just thump into the Moon's surface and make a mess! We humans are vandals! (OK, yes, I suppose one more tiny crater is not going to be the end of the World Moon but there will be fragments of rocket spread over a very wide area.
`Rocket part on crash course with Moon 'not from Elon Musk's SpaceX'' LINK

Is it any surprise? We have trashed earth, why not the moon and beyond?

Yes, here's more evidence of us trashing Earth, all down to climate deniers who prevented early attempts to stop man-made global warming...
`More than 8 million trees were lost this winter in the UK'
I find this depressing, and we're about to lose more trees in Storm Dudlye and Storm Eunice. Note that much damage was done because Storm Arwen, unusually, came from the north but old trees have root plates anchored to defend against winds from the west. People often think big trees must have deep roots but they don't. In most trees the roots are shallow and spread outwards rather than downwards. Our attempts to grow millions more trees is going to be countered by violent storms blowing them down as they get bigger.

Now we have the spectacle of land being bought up by international companies to plant trees to 'offset' the pollution they are throwing in the air to meet some mythical carbon neutral balance. Meanwhile farmers can't afford to buy the land for crops or animals pushing up our import bills. What a topsy turvy world we live in.

Tizer wrote: ↑16 Feb 2022, 10:25 all down to climate deniers

What's a 'climate denier' ?

People like Nigel Lawson who still won't believe the evidence for man-made climate change.

Tizer wrote: ↑16 Feb 2022, 10:25 Yes, here's more evidence of us trashing Earth, all down to climate deniers who prevented early attempts to stop man-made global warming...
`More than 8 million trees were lost this winter in the UK'
I find this depressing, and we're about to lose more trees in Storm Dudlye and Storm Eunice. Note that much damage was done because Storm Arwen, unusually, came from the north but old trees have root plates anchored to defend against winds from the west. People often think big trees must have deep roots but they don't. In most trees the roots are shallow and spread outwards rather than downwards. Our attempts to grow millions more trees is going to be countered by violent storms blowing them down as they get bigger.

Is there a problem in the national trust having trees in parkland settings - created by the rich of mostly victorian times, rather than semi protected by hedgerows to break up wind before getting to trees. Are there better trees for urban townscapes than the birch . (I tend to prefer alder and hornbeam but dont know how well they mix with concrete - and are they well protected by taller buildings ? We dont really design new urban areas around prevailing winds that much, and trees come as an afterthough mainly for their foliage cover. (london planes of course take pollution from the air as they drop in leaf leaves and bark consistantly , removing particles in the process from their pores as they grow.

Dead right Ken and when our leaders suddenly realise what a mistake it was they'll find they can't just switch land back to food production, it takes many years....

Any amateur geologists on here who might find this interesting? Cornish Lithium

Looks like they have a long way to go yet.

Thanks for the link. They've been starting up this project for a while, drilling boreholes to get test samples. Being so mineral rich Cornwall has plenty of lithium-containing rocks but the trouble has always been that concentrations are low which means mining for them destroys a lot of environment and then the extraction of mineral from the rocks produces an enormous amount of waste, of which Cornwall has too much to deal with already. The new approach is to avoid mining by drilling boreholes deep down to capture lithium-rich geothermal fluids in the rocks. The same is being done in Germany and America. The bed of a shallow lake in California is so rich in lithium that the place is now known as `lithium valley'!

A 3-minute video explaining why water is such an unusual material....
`Why water is one of the weirdest things in the universe' LINK
Very good but I would quibble with two things. First, it says water is the second most common molecule in the universe after hydrogen - most `astrochemists' tell us that carbon monoxide (CO) is 2nd and water comes 3rd. Second I think it said or implied that present-day water molecules are all derived from the early universe, but we know that water can dissociate into hydrogen and and oxygen and then re-associate back to water. It's the elements in water that are derived from early on.

Interesting - and I knew some of it - especially the expansion on freezing.

I'm struggling with "all the water in the earth's oceans arrived on asteroids and comets". That would be an awful lot of them.

Isn't it strange what esoteric matters science investigates... I know it probably matters but I have never spent much time puzzling about which was the 2nd most common molecule.....

Tripps wrote: ↑22 Mar 2022, 11:56I'm struggling with "all the water in the earth's oceans arrived on asteroids and comets". That would be an awful lot of them.

It's not so surprising when you know that the Earth has been exposed to asteroids and comets for nearly 5 billion years. However, almost all of those objects bombarded Earth during the first billion years when the Solar System was still sorting itself out. What we've seen since is just a trickle by comparison. Look at all the craters on the Moon and you see what Earth would be like if it weren't for our plate tectonics, volcanos and weathering gradually replacing the planet's surface and erasing the craters. The Moon's mantle is cooler, less fluid and has no convection and therefore no tectonic plate activity. Nor does it have active volcanoes or weather. Most of the craters you see on the Moon are extremely old. Water would have arrived on the Moon from asteroids and comets but most of it has been stripped away by solar radiation.

Afraid I'm still struggling.

I can't get the image of little green men with buckets arriving and tipping the water out from my mind. . . ..

Imagine a moon sized iceberg David........

Perhaps we'd better not mention Snowball Earth!...
`Snowball Earth: The times our planet was covered in ice' LINK

Or the way the Isles are slowly tilting to the SE as the ground recovers from having that weight of ice removed 10,000 years ago.....

The Guardian probably ran this story on fungi so they could use that pun - `champignon communicators'...
`Fungus seeks similar: scientist investigates mushroom ‘chat’: Professor theorises electrical impulses sent by mycological organisms could be similar to human language' Guardian

I heard that report and thought of Merlin and his research on fungi......

This refers to the big asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period. It landed in the Gulf of Mexico but the impact drove a gigantic swell of water outwards, especially north up the lowlands to the east of the Rocky Mountain chain, probably what is now the Missouri basin. The water carried animal, plant and mineral detritus and palaeontologists have been finding fossils from the impact at Tanis in North Dakota...
`Tanis: Fossil of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike found, scientists claim' LINK

I listened to that report Peter and marvelled at the amount of information and the logic behind the interpretation. Couldn't help reminding myself of the biblical quotation, 'Seek and ye shall find'. The more we look, the more we learn.....

Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay

Discuss, I think this falls into the same category as whether or not a tree makes a noise if it falls in forest with no one to hear it!

Notwithstanding quantum mechanics and string theory. I reckon what we perceive of time is solely based on our planets journey around our star and the rotation of the earth each day and we have modified how we perceive it as our knowledge has increased.

24 hours for the earth to rotate on it's axis and 365.25 days to orbit our star.

Next news, those pesky scientists will be telling us that the tides don't ebb and flow, best leave the moon out of the equation.