[meteorite-list] BIG VENUS NEWS

From: lebofsky at lpl.arizona.edu <lebofsky_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:21:18 -0700 (MST)
Message-ID: <4932.71.226.60.25.1196360478.squirrel_at_timber.lpl.arizona.edu>

Hello Sterling:

I have not had a chance to read the articles in general, but if Venus is
still losing its water, and we are talking about this happening with the
last 1/2 billion years or so, is there any chance that it was realted to
the global resurfacing of Venus? Maybe Venus did have swamps and dinosaurs
a billion yers ago and then wham, along came golbal resurfacing which
boiled off the water and decomposed the carbonates!

Speculatively,

Larry Lebofsky

On Thu, November 29, 2007 1:10 am, Sterling K. Webb wrote:
> Hi, List,
>
>
> ESA had a big (press) conference to release the first
> findings of the Venus Express spacecraft. There will be nine papers by
> principal investigators in "Nature," next issue. So all the science
> reporters were there, of course, to get the inside story.
>
> The spacecraft detected "whistlers." Whistlers are
> sharp, short, frequency decreasing bursts of low frequency radio waves. You
> can detect whistlers on Earth by connecting an old-fashioned quarter-mile
> wire antenna to a stereo set, as the radio waves are in the audio
> frequencies! They are caused by lightning. Earlier indications of
> lightning on Venus have always been dismissed as "mistaken" but it appears
> we were mistaken about being mistaken.
>
> The second big story is the confirmation of the old Pioneer
> probe's detection of a high ratio of deuterium-to-hydrogen in the
> atmosphere of Venus. Well, that's only the small end of the big news. The
> big end of the big news is that the D-to-H ratio of the UPPER atmosphere
> is 2.5 times greater than it is in the lower atmosphere.
>
> Well, you say, scratching your head, so what? It means that
> water loss from Venus is going on right now, not a few billion years ago or
> just one billion years ago. No, Venus is losing water right now. The
> deuterium is heavier than hydrogen; when water is split and stripped from
> the top of the atmosphere by the solar wind, more deuterium remains than
> hydrogen. The fact that there is a higher D-to-H ratio up top means that
> the water loss is both very active and on-going, that Venus is still
> bleeding water, that the water loss did NOT begin anciently, but recently
> (cosmically
> speaking, say 400 or 500 million years, or even more recently).
>
> The reporters had heavy going trying to figure this out, quite
> possibly because the Venus "specialists" are also having heavy going trying
> to figure all this out, mostly because reality is doing such a poor job of
> matching theory. They were disapproving of these unruly facts. Example:
> whistlers, yes, but not from lightning. From what? It's a mystery.
>
> There isn't one press account I can paste in here to sum it
> all up, since every press account varies according to which "expert" was
> being interviewed. So, here's the major news stories, with a scorecard...
>
> Space.com believes the lightning but doubts the water:
> http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/071128-venus-express.html
>
>
> The NY Times doubts the lightning, believes the water,
> but doesn't know what it's all about:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/science/space/29venus.html?ref=space
>
>
> The Independent believes in more lightning, thinks the lack of
> a magnetic field caused the loss of water, not global warming:
> http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3204073.ece
>
>
> The AFP says Venus was "doomed by global warming!"
> http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gFOc6GAb7TDdajJhw-5xwwcfFZRA
>
>
> The Houston Chronicle thinks Venus was "just too close to the Sun"
> http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5337291.html
> (The last time I was in Houston, I flew into Hobby at 7pm
> and it was 107 F. in the shade, and there was no shade as all the leaves
> had died and dropped off from the heat. This is a "natural" theory for a
> Houston paper, I think.)
>
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
>
>
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Received on Thu 29 Nov 2007 01:21:18 PM PST