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Geology, Climate and Global Warming

Craig Peterson’s Inside Scoop, ClearChannel Radio’s Number One Saturday Radio Show in the Boston Market

Pat Abbot Professor Emeritus of Geology at San Diego State University Department of Geological Sciences speaks with Craig about Climate, Global Warming and What Geology tells us.

- Climate and change go together. Climate changes on every time scale from millions of years to thousands to decades, etc.
- Many people do not understand the difference between climate and weather. Weather is day-to-day and is always changing. For some odd reason, every heat wave or cold spell is seen by some folks as unusual, a rarity, unexpected, and other such silliness.
- The current topic of global warming is definitely worth understanding.
- The global scientific community is overwhelming agreed that average annual surface temperature on the Earth is the warmest it has been in over one thousand years.
- Some of the scientists most vocal about global warming not being real are ignoring facts to focus on a personally favored view; some of them are doing it for publicity and/or to gain more funding.
- At present, the Earth is undergoing a natural warming, but piggybacked on top of this trend is an even greater amount of warming due to human activities.
- Carbon dioxide additions to the atmosphere have accelerated as we have burned ever more oil, natural gas, coal and wood. The expected greenhouse warming is actually less than it ought to be. The dominant thought now is that the excess heat is being stored in the ocean and thus much of our excess will be dealt with by future generations.
- It has long been popular to state that the US is the main producer of CO2. However, in a matter of months China will pass us up.
- The much argued Kyoto Treaty exempts “developing” countries from greenhouse gas restrictions. China and India are near the top of the list of CO2 emitters but are not required to do anything. Is Kyoto really about climate?
- The biggest part of the problem is the one not talked about anymore — the explosive growth in the human population — it reached 3 billion in 1960, 4 in 1974, 5 in 1987, 6 in 1999, and has now passed 6.6.billion. About 30% of the world population is below the age of 15 and has not yet done their breeding. The soaring population will all use energy thus adding to global warming.
- Other gases also add to the greenhouse effect. For example, methane (CH4). Humans release CH4 via rice production and cattle raising (>1 billion cows now). Methane is 21 times as potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
-- World population and energy usage both are on unstoppable growth trends. Thus global warming will increase. The big worries are not how the rising temperatures affect us directly but how they change rainfall and agriculture.
- It sure would be nice if technologists could figure out a way to make CO2 capture into a profitable business. I have more confidence in technological creativity than in the abilities of the world’s political leaders and bodies.

Pat AbbottProfessor Emeritus of Geology at San Diego State UniversityDepartment of Geological Sciences
Author of textbook Natural Disasters (6th ed.) published by McGraw-Hill.

Giant Meteorite Crater Discovered in California

A space rock the size of three football fields may have slammed into California more than 35 million years ago, according to a team of scientists that includes a high school student.
The proposed impact may have created the giant 3.4-mile-wide (5.5-kilometer-wide) craterlike formation that the team found buried 4,900 to 5,250 feet (1,490 to 1,600 meters) below sea level west of Stockton, California.
Rocks in the potential crater date to about 37 to 49 million years ago.
The formation resembles an impact crater, the researchers said, but they are continuing to analyze rocks from oil exploration wells dug in the region for telltale signs of a collision.
Jared Morrow, an assistant professor of geology at San Diego State University, presented preliminary details of the discovery earlier this month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.
Samuel Spevack, a senior at Grossmont Middle College High School in El Cajon, California, is leading the continuing analysis and will discuss the project next month at a meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in Long Beach.

Science Fair
Samuel's father, Bennett Spevack, is a geologist with ABA Energy Corporation in San Diego. He first spotted the crater while examining seismic survey data of the Central Valley region.
"It looked interesting because it was circular," he said. "My son saw it and expressed interest in figuring out whether it might be an impact crater."
Samuel presented seismic data of the proposed impact crater at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair in 2005.
The data clearly shows a circular structure carved out of an ancient sea bed.
The high school student won an award at the fair, but the scientific community requires additional rock evidence before it can verify a new impact crater.
Samuel Spevack partnered with Morrow for the continued analysis. The researchers are searching for deformities in the rocks, such as shocked quartz, that require the high-shock pressure of impacts in order to form.
"We've found a few grains that exhibit some features of shock, but there still needs to be other searching and peer reviewing," Samuel Spevack said.
David Kring is an expert on impact craters at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. He said the presentation at the conference was appropriate for this stage of the crater analysis, but more rock analysis is required "to confirm an impact origin."
"The reason that's important is [that] there are a lot of geologic processes that make circular structures," he added.

Headline Impact
According to Bennett Spevack, if a space rock did crash into California's Central Valley, it would have created a 1,500-megaton explosion.
"This is not big enough to have wiped out the dinosaurs, but I guess it certainly would have made headlines if one this size would hit San Francisco," he said.
Scientists believe California's Central Valley was underwater at the time of the possible meteorite strike. If so, the impact may have also triggered a tsunami.
The proposed impact crater, called the Victoria Island structure, is being added to a database of suspected impacts. It joins the 0.8-mile (1.3-kilometer) Cowell structure to the north as California's only potential impact craters.
Neither structure is confirmed.
"If [the Victoria Island structure] can be proven, it'll be the first one in California," Bennett Spevack said.
Source National Geographic News

ONLINE SEMINAR
3-D seismic, well log, and petrographic analyses of the Victoria Island structure, a potential buried impact crater, San Joaquin county, California