The Goldilocks Planet – Part 1

I’ve recently finished listening to “The Goldilocks Planet : the four billion story of Earth’s climate.”

It’s a complicated book, so I’m splitting this into two posts.

Earth is in the “Goldilocks zone” of our solar system, but so are Venus & Mars.  Sadly, Mars was too small causing it’s metallic core to become cold thus ending the magnetosphere of that planet.  Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, but it too had problems.  “At some point during it’s history the temperature rose high enough for water vapor to leak into it’s upper atmosphere where the solar wind carried it away.”  This loss of water caused carbon dioxide levels to rise in the atmosphere because it couldn’t be washed away in acid-rain thus trapping heat.

Earth might have had the same fate as Mars, being too small, were it not for an early impact with the Mars sized planet Theia.  That cataclysm caused us to get our Moon, and it is also considered to be the beginning of our climate story here on Earth.  Why?  Because that impact “defined the spin & tilt of the Earth,” and set up of our Earth / Moon system.  As the Earth cooled so began the 1 billion year long Hadean eon.

Our planet’s climate occurs because of the interactions of biology, geology, and astronomy, and we will discuss that in my next post about this book.

 

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