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The unsolved mystery of the Earth blobs (2019)

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Re: The unsolved mystery of the Earth blobs (2019)

#11

Post by adrian_b »

akomtu wrote: post #10

Former continents?

That cannot be.

The continents are made of the rocks (e.g. granite) which are lighter than the average rocks of the Earth, so they float above the mantle.

Those "blobs" are heavier than the average rocks, so unlike the continental rocks that have more aluminum and alkali metals than the average, the heavier rocks must have more iron and manganese than the average.

As others have already mentioned, the most likely hypothesis is that they are remnants of the bodies which have collided with the Earth soon after its formation.

Re: The unsolved mystery of the Earth blobs (2019)

#12

Post by prox »

kuu wrote: post #8

It's interesting to read these kind of articles that show how little we know about some things. In my case at least I have the general feeling that all is mostly solved by science, but I find it really interesting/motivational that we still have "simple" unsolved things around us (or under us ;) )

Whenever I feel like that, I just peruse this list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...

The advancements we made in science is fantastic though. But a lot of work is ahead of us.

Re: The unsolved mystery of the Earth blobs (2019)

#13

Post by agent327 »

fsloth wrote: post #9
kuu wrote: post #8

It's interesting to read these kind of articles that show how little we know about some things. In my case at least I have the general feeling that all is mostly solved by science, but I find it really interesting/motivational that we still have "simple" unsolved things around us (or under us ;) )

"all is mostly solved by science" I think this is a terrible misconception which I had as well in childhood (a MSc in physics cured me of that - I'm mostly as dumb and ignorant as without the degree sans some tiny areas of knowledge). Maybe this misconception is caused by the popular faith in 'expertise' and the fact that only well understood phenomena make good news articles and popular science programs. It's import…

Around 1800 or so, you could order a box of insects from the colonies, spend time carefully describing each, publish, and in so doing, with comparatively minimal effort, be a scientist. But the low-hanging fruit has largely been picked now, and for non-scientists, the barrier to joining in, to contribute something meaningful, is so much higher now that it may appear that everything is now known. Indeed, the things that are not known are so far outside the realm of everyday experience that non-scientists aren't even aware of the questions anymore.

Interestingly, some companies have programs that let you experience being a 'citizen scientist' for yourself. As one example I'm aware of, https://taxonexpeditions.com/

Re: The unsolved mystery of the Earth blobs (2019)

#14

Post by lovemenot »

chasil wrote: post #2

My hunch would be that these large structures are the remnants of massive impactors from very early in the history of the formation of the earth.

I didn't have such a hunch, though yours is interesting.

I assumed these were not so much persistent structures as waves whose current state is more-or-less arbitrarily determined by previous state and some effectively random physical inputs.

Re: The unsolved mystery of the Earth blobs (2019)

#15

Post by ogurechny »

fsloth wrote: post #9
kuu wrote: post #8

It's interesting to read these kind of articles that show how little we know about some things. In my case at least I have the general feeling that all is mostly solved by science, but I find it really interesting/motivational that we still have "simple" unsolved things around us (or under us ;) )

"all is mostly solved by science" I think this is a terrible misconception which I had as well in childhood (a MSc in physics cured me of that - I'm mostly as dumb and ignorant as without the degree sans some tiny areas of knowledge). Maybe this misconception is caused by the popular faith in 'expertise' and the fact that only well understood phenomena make good news articles and popular science programs. It's import…

One doesn't have to be a professional anthropologist to see that since some time in the 19th century “science” became a popular set of religious beliefs that explain the world to a commoner, thanks to mass education. Semi-jokingly, the watershed was when charlatans started promoting snake oils using scientific language. The spherical Universal Observer in a vacuum, which is understood (at least by some scientists) to be an idealized part of the imaginary model cleaned from the impurities of reality, is considered a possibility, a goal, a metaphor of “all human knowledge combined” in that trivialized belief.

Various faces of scientism have been criticized in various ways for all that time, from obvious examples in Dostoevsky novels to hardcore philosophical papers.

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