amour2vivant asked:
I need evidence to back up that plate tectonics (continental drift) processes can cause global warming. I need to find plate tectonics forces that have nothing to do with humankind that is contributing to global warming. Much of what I have found is how plate tectonics can cause cooling of the earth rather than warming it. I need help researching this as I am not having much luck. I have found that ocean currents and volcanoes actually cool the earth rather than warming it.
I need evidence to back up that plate tectonics (continental drift) processes can cause global warming. I need to find plate tectonics forces that have nothing to do with humankind that is contributing to global warming. Much of what I have found is how plate tectonics can cause cooling of the earth rather than warming it. I need help researching this as I am not having much luck. I have found that ocean currents and volcanoes actually cool the earth rather than warming it.
Whether I believe humankind is causing global warming or not, is not important in this research.
September 12th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
First of all, “Global Warming” is a theory, and not a fact. If you are doing scientific research, you need to be careful to distinguish facts from hypotheses. There is a lot evidence to suggest that indeed the average temperature is increasing, but there is also evidence that the average temperature is decreasing, such as the oceans getting cooler not warmer over the last 15 or so years. On top of that, plate tectonics is also a theory, all but proven, just like atomic theory.
Plate tectonics contribute to the amount of heat energy in the earth’s atmosphere with the release of physical heat of volcanoes and terrestrial and submarine lavas as well as so-called greenhouse gases such as CO2 released from volcanoes. There is also the dissipation of heat from friction in compressional and transcurrent plate margins. All of this heat is the indirect result of the radiogenic heat deep with the earth that drives plate tectonics in the first place.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:26 am
The movement of continental masses in the geologic past always affects the climate because ocean currents and circulation patterns are altered. These alterations will and have caused many glaciations (or ice ages for you Neanderthals). In the periods of time between these glacial advances there have been warming periods (aka inter-glacial periods). One could call these periods global warming periods.
Therefore, because plate tectonics is responsible for the movement of continents it is also responsible for the climactic changes that are a result of continents moving around (i.e. Global Warming).