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133 points kristianp | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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EGreg[dead post] ◴[] No.42161012[source]
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iambateman ◴[] No.42161504[source]
The downvotes are misplaced. This is a good question.

The value of HN is when people-who-know help curious folks understand the validity of a story. Surely someone here is more capable of assessing this story and I agree that skepticism is in order at first.

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bulatb ◴[] No.42161737[source]
Skepticism should begin with the skeptic's own motives. A skeptic's second question (after "Really?" or "Why?") should be, "Why am I asking?"

Do they want to test the claim to learn something, or to dismiss it, just to dismiss it?

If they're asking questions which are literally answered as part of the claim, they need to start over, and start with themselves.

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iambateman ◴[] No.42161798[source]
The article claims that 363 billion tons of phosphorous were dropped on earth 3.26 billion years ago during a decade of darkness.

I’m completely incapable of making sense of that claim because it’s so far outside of my expertise.

But my fundamental problem is that I don’t trust the source’s incentives to deliver reliable information and I want someone independent to help me understand if this is a how strong or weak this science is.

And my starting point for that is “it’s very hard to know anything specific about the deep past. And I’m tired of scientific retractions.”

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1. rcyeh ◴[] No.42161994[source]
Just going through the numbers:

363 BB tons / (1 ton / cu m) / (1 BB cu m / cu km) is the mass of a 9-km-diameter ice ball, smaller for rockier materials.

363 BB tons / 10 years = 100 MM tons / day.

By comparison, Mount St Helens (1980) and Eyjafjallajökull (2010) each produced 500 MM tons of ash. So the amount of material is about equivalent to having a similarly-sized volcano eruption every few days for ten years straight.

The Earth's surface area is 500 MM sq km. If we were to distribute 363 BB tons uniformly, that would be an average of 1000 tons per sq km. If the layer had a density of 1 ton per cu m (same as water), the resulting layer would be 1/1000 of a meter thick. This seems to be thinner than the spherule layers described.

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2. datameta ◴[] No.42165772[source]
We're assuming an even average distribution, and comparing ash to spherules - which would have different patterns of sedimentation depending on how far from epicenter one is. Although, for a large enough impact, the distribution radii overlap around the planet so there may be quite a bit of averaging as the sun+atmosphere provides a mixing medium and the energy to do so.