Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T21:35:17.785Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Earth-Like: an education & outreach tool for exploring the diversity of planets like our own

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2020

Elizabeth J. Tasker Open the ORCID record for Elizabeth J. Tasker [Opens in a new window] ,
Kana Ishimaru ,
Nicholas Guttenberg  and
Julien Foriel
Elizabeth J. Tasker*
Affiliation:
Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Yoshinodai 3-1-1, Sagamihara, Kanagawa252-5210, Japan
Kana Ishimaru
Affiliation:
Department of Earth & Planetary Environmental Science, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Tokyo113-0033, Japan Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Nicholas Guttenberg
Affiliation:
Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1, Tokyo, Japan
Julien Foriel
Affiliation:
Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1, Tokyo, Japan Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Elizabeth J. Tasker, E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Earth-Like is an interactive website and twitter bot that allows users to explore changes in the average global surface temperature of an Earth-like planet due to variations in the surface oceans and emerged land coverage, rate of volcanism (degassing) and the level of the received solar radiation. The temperature is calculated using a simple carbon–silicate cycle model to change the level of CO2 in the atmosphere based on the chosen parameters. The model can achieve a temperature range exceeding −100°C to 100°C by varying all three parameters, including freeze-thaw cycles for a planet with our present-day volcanism rate and emerged land fraction situated at the outer edge of the habitable zone. To increase engagement, the planet is visualized by using a neural network to render an animated globe, based on the calculated average surface temperature and chosen values for land fraction and volcanism. The website and bot can be found at earthlike.world and on twitter as @earthlikeworld. Initial feedback via a user survey suggested that Earth-Like is effective at demonstrating that minor changes in planetary properties can strongly impact the surface environment. The goal of the project is to increase understanding of the challenges we face in finding another habitable planet due to the likely diversity of conditions on rocky worlds within our Galaxy.

Keywords

Science communicationeducationexoplanetshabitabilityclimate
Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Astrobiology , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , June 2020 , pp. 264 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbot, DS (2016) Analytical investigation of the decrease in the size of the habitable zone due to a limited co2outgassing rate. The Astrophysical Journal 827, 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abbot, DS, Cowan, NB and Ciesla, FJ (2012) Indication of insensitivity of planetary weathering behavior and habitable zone to surface land fraction. The Astrophysical Journal 756, 178–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berner, RA (1994) GEOCARB II; a revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time. American Journal of Science 294, 56–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldeira, K (1991) Continental-pelagic carbonate partitioning and the global carbonate-silicate cycle. Geology 19, 204–206.2.3.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, PU, Archer, D, Pollard, D, Blum, JD, Rial, JA, Brovkin, V, Mix, AC, Pisias, NG and Roy, M (2006) The middle pleistocene transition: characteristics, mechanisms, and implications for long-term changes in atmospheric pco2. Quaternary Science Reviews 25, 3150–3184. Critical Quaternary Stratigraphy.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Del Genio, AD, Way, MJ, Amundsen, DS, Aleinov, I, Kelley, M, Kiang, NY and Clune, TL (2019) Habitable Climate Scenarios for Proxima Centauri b with a Dynamic Ocean. Astrobiology 19, 99–125.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ebner, M and Reinhardt, W (2009) Social networking in scientific conferences – twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Science 2.0 for TEL at the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL'09), Nice France.Google Scholar
Feulner, G (2012) The faint young Sun problem. Reviews of Geophysics 50, RG2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foley, BJ (2015) The role of plate tectonic–climate coupling and exposed land area in the development of habitable climates on rocky planets. The Astrophysical Journal 812, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaillardet, J, Dupré, B, Louvat, P and Allègre, CJ (1999) Global silicate weathering and $\rm CO_2$ consumption rates deduced from the chemistry of large rivers. Chemical Geology 159, 3–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hays, J, Imbrie, J and Shackleton, NJ et al. (1976) Variations in the earth's orbit: pacemaker of the ice ages. Science (New York, N.Y.) 194, 1121–1132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heng, K and Vogt, SS (2011) Gliese 581g as a scaled-up version of Earth: atmospheric circulation simulations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 415, 2145–2157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, K and Thelwall, M (2014) Disciplinary differences in twitter scholarly communication. Scientometrics 101, 1027–1042.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Isola, P, Zhu, J-Y, Zhou, T and Efros, AA (2016) Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks. arXiv e-prints, page arXiv:1611.07004.Google Scholar
Jansen, E, Overpeck, J, Briffa, KR, Duplessy, JC, Joos, F, Masson-Delmotte, V, Olago, D, Otto-Bliesner, B, Peltier, WR, Rahmstorf, S, Ramesh, R, Raynaud, D, Rind, D, Solomina, O, Villalba, R and Zhang, D (2007) Palaeoclimate. In Solomon S, Qin D, Manning M, Chen Z, Marquis M, Averyt K, Tignor MMB, and Miller HL Jr (eds), Climate Change 2007: The Scientific Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 433–497.Google Scholar
Jolicoeur-Martineau, A (2018) The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN. CoRR, arXiv:1807.00734.Google Scholar
Kasting, JF, Whitmire, DP and Reynolds, RT (1993) Habitable Zones around Main Sequence Stars. Icarus 101, 108–128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kopparapu, RK, Ramirez, R, Kasting, JF, Eymet, V, Robinson, TD, Mahadevan, S, Terrien, RC, Domagal-Goldman, S, Meadows, V and Deshpande, R (2013) Habitable Zones around Main-sequence Stars: New Estimates. The Astrophysical Journal 765, 131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krissansen-Totton, J and Catling, DC (2017) Constraining climate sensitivity and continental versus seafloor weathering using an inverse geological carbon cycle model. Nature Communications 8, 15423.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pierrehumbert, RT (2011) A Palette of Climates for Gliese 581g. The Astrophysical Journal 726, L8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prentice, I, Farquhar, G, Fasham, M, Goulden, M, Heimann, M, Jaramillo, V, Kheshgi, H, LeQuéré, C, Scholes, R and Wallace, DW (2001) The carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon dioxide. In Houghton J, Ding Y, Griggs D, Noguer M, van der Linden P, Dai X, Maskell K, and Johnson C (eds), Climate Change 2001: the Scientific Basis. Contributions of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 185–237.Google Scholar
Ronneberger, O, Fischer, P and Brox, T (2015) U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. CoRR, arXiv:1505.04597.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seager, S (2013) Exoplanet habitability. Science (New York, N.Y.) 340, 577–581.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Simonyan, K and Zisserman, A (2014) Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition. arXiv e-prints, page arXiv:1409.1556.Google Scholar
Tasker, E, Tan, J, Heng, K, Kane, S, Spiegel, D, Brasser, R, Casey, A, Desch, S, Dorn, C, Hernlund, J, Houser, C, Laneuville, M, Lasbleis, M, Libert, A-S, Noack, L, Unterborn, C and Wicks, J (2017) The language of exoplanet ranking metrics needs to change. Nature Astronomy 1, 0042.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unterborn, CT, Desch, SJ, Hinkel, NR and Lorenzo, A (2018) Inward migration of the TRAPPIST-1 planets as inferred from their water-rich compositions. Nature Astronomy 2, 297–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, JCG, Hays, PB and Kasting, JF (1981) A negative feedback mechanism for the long-term stabilization of the earth's surface temperature. Journal of Geophysical Research 86, 9776–9782.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
West, AJ, Galy, A and Bickle, M (2005) Tectonic and climatic controls on silicate weathering [rapid communication]. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 235, 211–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar