@michaellorton8099

4 weeks ago

What effect on Earth’s magnetosphere? If we can harvest geothermal energy without adversely affecting the Earth’s protective magnetic field which shields us from deadly solar winds, great. The problem is that no one has done the regression analysis to determine the extent to which withdrawing heat from the Earth’s outer core slows or stops the eddy currents in the molten iron which generate our magnetosphere.

Mars had an atmosphere that was protected by its magnetosphere, but had that atmosphere stripped away by solar winds when massive volcanoes cooled and stopped the eddy currents in the then molten Martian outer core. Without the eddy currents to induce the magnetic field protection, Mars had its atmosphere stripped away by the high energy solar wind particles. A planet that once could have supported life no longer can.

Our magnetosphere is waning by about 5% per century without any additional cooling of our outer core by geothermal energy harvesting. If Earth’s protective magnetosphere is already weakening, perhaps we should find out whether our taking much more heat from the outer core will significantly slow and weaken the electrical eddy currents that induce the only thing that keeps our life-sustaining atmosphere from being stripped away. If our use of ever greater amounts of geothermal heat is de minimus, great—but we really should know and not speculate about or ignore such an important question.

At this point almost no one knows about such potentially dangerous effects of geothermal energy much less actively investigates to quantify them. Just saying . . .

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