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Suggestion as to the Cause of the Earth's Internal Heat
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2014
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During the discussions that have arisen as to the internal heat of the earth, the writer has never seen any reason given for supposing that there was a time when the earth was a highly heated fluid mass, and he believes that view to have originated by analogy from the case of the sun; and no other cause of the heat seems to be generally assumed than the collisions of the parts that came together to form the earth's mass. He has expected to find some one maintaining that gradual gravitational compression of the mass was the main source of the earth's internal heat, but till recently he has never tried to find out if it could possibly be a sufficient cause. It has always seemed to him that the formation of the earth's mass must have been accomplished under circumstances so different from the case of the sun that an analogy could scarcely be drawn between the two cases; indeed, it is obvious that the amount of heat produced by the formation of planets from nebulae will depend principally on their masses, and will be in a, higher ratio than that of the masses.
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- Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1904
References
page 416 note * This is about the density of granite.
page 417 note * If we were dealing with a fluid this would be too high, but with rock the case is different, for the compression will lag very greatly behind the corresponding pressure, and the amount of lag will always be decreasing.
page 417 note † This is equivalent to 15,768,000 foot-pounds of energy expended on each pound of matter, which, again, is equivalent to a fall to the surface from over three times the earth's radius above it.
page 419 note * Perhaps volcanic action should be considered as a manifestation of gravitational contraction.
page 421 note * Not much importance can be given to Laplace's law above any other. Wiechert supposes that the earth consists of an iron central portion of nearly uniform density and a radius of about four-fifths of the earth's radius. See G. Darwin's paper on the “Theory of the Figure of the Earth” (Monthly Notices, E.A.S., vol. lx., 1898).Google Scholar