Posts tagged energy
CU: Early life on Earth supported by faint sun
Jul 21st
In fact, two CU-Boulder researchers say all that may have been required to sustain liquid water and primitive life on Earth during the Archean eon 2.8 billion years ago were reasonable atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts believed to be present at the time and perhaps a dash of methane. The key to the solution was the use of sophisticated three-dimensional climate models that were run for thousands of hours on CU’s Janus supercomputer, rather than crude, one-dimensional models used by almost all scientists attempting to solve the paradox, said doctoral student Eric Wolf, lead study author.
“It’s really not that hard in a three-dimensional climate model to get average surface temperatures during the Archean that are in fact moderate,” said Wolf, a doctoral student in CU-Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. “Our models indicate the Archean climate may have been similar to our present climate, perhaps a little cooler. Even if Earth was sliding in and out of glacial periods back then, there still would have been a large amount of liquid water in equatorial regions, just like today.”
Evolutionary biologists believe life arose on Earth as simple cells roughly 3.5 billion years ago, about a billion years after the planet is thought to have formed. Scientists have speculated the first life may have evolved in shallow tide pools, freshwater ponds, freshwater or deep-sea hydrothermal vents, or even arrived on objects from space.
A cover article by Wolf and Toon on the topic appears in the July issue of Astrobiology. The study was funded by two NASA grants and by the National Science Foundation, which supports CU-Boulder’s Janus supercomputer used for the study.
Scientists have been trying to solve the faint young sun paradox since 1972, when Cornell University scientist Carl Sagan — Toon’s doctoral adviser at the time — and colleague George Mullen broached the subject. Since then there have been many studies using 1-D climate models to try to solve the faint young sun paradox — with results ranging from a hot, tropical Earth to a “snowball Earth” with runaway glaciation — none of which have conclusively resolved the problem.
“In our opinion, the one-dimensional models of early Earth created by scientists to solve this paradox are too simple — they are essentially taking the early Earth and reducing it to a single column atmospheric profile,” said Toon. “One-dimensional models are simply too crude to give an accurate picture.”
Wolf and Toon used a general circulation model known as the Community Atmospheric Model version 3.0 developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and which contains 3-D atmosphere, ocean, land, cloud and sea ice components. The two researchers also “tuned up” the model with a sophisticated radiative transfer component that allowed for the absorption, emission and scattering of solar energy and an accurate calculation of the greenhouse effect for the unusual atmosphere of early Earth, where there was no oxygen and no ozone, but lots of CO2 and possibly methane.
The simplest solution to the faint sun paradox, which duplicates Earth’s present climate, involves maintaining roughly 20,000 parts per million of the greenhouse gas CO2 and 1,000 ppm of methane in the ancient atmosphere some 2.8 billion years ago, said Wolf. While that may seem like a lot compared to today’s 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, geological studies of ancient soil samples support the idea that CO2 likely could have been that high during that time period. Methane is considered to be at least 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2 and could have played a significant role in warming the early Earth as well, said the CU researchers.
There are other reasons to believe that CO2 was much higher in the Archean, said Toon, who along with Wolf is associated with CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The continental area of Earth was smaller back then so there was less weathering of the land and a lower release of minerals to the oceans. As a result there was a smaller conversion of CO2 to limestone in the ocean. Likewise, there were no “rooted” land plants in the Archean, which could have accelerated the weathering of the soils and indirectly lowered the atmospheric abundance of CO2, Toon said.
Another solution to achieving a habitable but slightly cooler climate under the faint sun conditions is for the Archean atmosphere to have contained roughly 15,000 to 20,000 ppm of CO2 and no methane, said Wolf. “Our results indicate that a weak version of the faint young sun paradox, requiring only that some portion of the planet’s surface maintain liquid water, may be resolved with moderate greenhouse gas inventories,” the authors wrote in Astrobiology.
“Even if half of Earth’s surface was below freezing back in the Archean and half was above freezing, it still would have constituted a habitable planet since at least 50 percent of the ocean would have remained open,” said Wolf. “Most scientists have not considered that there might have been a middle ground for the climate of the Archean.
“The leap from one-dimensional to three-dimensional models is an important step,” said Wolf. “Clouds and sea ice are critical factors in determining climate, but the one-dimensional models completely ignore them.”
Has the faint young sun paradox finally been solved? “I don’t want to be presumptuous here,” said Wolf. “But we show that the paradox is definitely not as challenging as was believed over the past 40 years. While we can’t say definitively what the atmosphere looked like back then without more geological evidence, it is certainly not a stretch at all with our model to get a warm early Earth that would have been hospitable to life.”
“The Janus supercomputer has been a tremendous addition to the campus, and this early Earth climate modeling project would have impossible without it,” said Toon. The researchers estimated the project required roughly 6,000 hours of supercomputer computation time, an effort equal to about 10 years on a home computer.
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CU-BOULDER NAMES MOE TABRIZI ITS FIRST DIRECTOR OF CAMPUS SUSTAINABILITY
Dec 22nd
Currently CU-Boulder’s energy conservation officer, Tabrizi will continue to work in collaboration with the CU Environmental Center, Housing and Dining Services and CU Student Government to further CU’s many campus sustainability initiatives.
“As a university, we’ve already made large strides in achieving goals in sustainability,” said Frank Bruno, vice chancellor for administration. “In order to get beyond what we’ve already achieved, there will be a need for greater collaboration and innovative ideas. Elevating Moe’s current position will help to facilitate and coordinate these efforts.”
As CU-Boulder’s first sustainability director, Tabrizi is charged with the task of meeting the “Greening the Government” Governor’s Energy Orders, as well as campus initiatives that include:
–Reduce energy consumption by 20 percent by 2012
–Reduce water consumption by 10 percent by 2012
–Reduce petroleum use by 25 percent by 2012
–Reduce paper use by 20 percent by 2012
–Utilize energy efficient and sustainable design standards on all new construction and applicable renovation projects. All such projects shall seek to meet or exceed LEED Gold Certification.
CU-Boulder recently was awarded the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, or STARS, Gold rating. The Gold rating is the first to be awarded to a college campus. With more than 230 colleges and universities registered with STARS, this rating accurately compares colleges and universities around the nation, and is a key measurement of CU’s national leadership on sustainability issues.
Tabrizi will spearhead CU’s combined efforts on a number of challenging long-term tasks, such as achieving carbon neutrality. He will serve as the campus’s chief sustainability coordinator and spokesperson on issues of sustainability. He will interface with key campus leaders, as well as with officials from state and local government and from other universities, to ensure that CU-Boulder maintains its national leadership position on sustainability issues.
“I am honored by this appointment,” said Tabrizi. “I look forward to working with valued campus partners – including our amazing student leadership at the Environmental Center – and to making new progress on a bold sustainability agenda.”
In addition to moving the campus forward on many goals and initiatives, he will continue in his role as the assistant director for engineering in the department of planning, design and construction.
For more information about CU-Boulder’s sustainability efforts visit Resource Conservation and http://ecenter.colorado.edu/index.php.
Go Tankless of Colorado
Jun 12th
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