Related papers: The Cambrian impact hypothesis
We do several simple calculations and measurements in an effort to gain understanding of global warming and the carbon cycle. Some conclusions are interesting: (i) There has been global warming since the end of the "little ice age" around…
The Kepler era of exoplanetary discovery has presented the Astronomical community with a cornucopia of planetary systems very different from the one which we inhabit. It has long been known that Jupiter plays a major role in the orbital…
An astrophysical model is proposed to answer Fermi's question. Gamma-ray bursts have the correct rates of occurrence and plausibly the correct energetics to have consequences for the evolution of life on a galactic scale. If one assumes…
After the initial suggestion by Zahnle and Walker (1987) that the torque accelerating the spin rate of the Earth and produced by the heating of the atmosphere by the Sun could counteract the braking lunir-solar gravitational torque in the…
The model accepted is one where during the Archean Eon the Earths climate was clement despite the weaker Sun. The observational evidence that supports this concept is: the emergence of life, the existence of evaporitic sediments and the…
Solar X-ray and UV radiation (0.1-320 nm) received at Earth's surface is an important aspect of the circumstances under which life formed on Earth. The quantity that is received depends on two main variables: the emission of radiation by…
We discuss the impact of charged massive particle big bang nucleosynthesis(CBBN) to explore the nature of the reheating of the Universe in the case that a new extremely long-lived charged massive particle(CHAMP) exists. If the mass of the…
We fit 12 independent surface temperature time series (zones of latitude), 6 land- and 6 ocean-based, with a Gaussian (centered around WW2) on a quadratic background. The four polar zones are unusable. Each of the remaining 8 shows evidence…
Essential insights on the characterization and quality of a detectable biosphere are gained by analyzing the effects of its environmental parameters. We compiled environmental and biological properties of the Phanerozoic Eon from various…
Typically cold inflation with positive vacuum energy density dilutes all matter except the quan- tum fluctuations which are stretched outside the Hubble patch during inflation. However the cyclic- inflation scenario, where the universe…
The big bang hypothesis is widely accepted despite numerous physics conflicts. It rests upon two experimental supports, galactic red shift and the cosmic microwave background. Both are produced by dark matter, shown here to be hydrogen…
The variations of water density and thermal conductivity of the oceans cold region waters according to their salinity lead to suggest an hypothesis of an oscillating climate between two extreme positions: a maximum of hot temperatures and a…
We present results of simulations of the climate of the newly discovered planet Proxima Centauri B, performed using the Met Office Unified Model (UM). We examine the responses of both an `Earth-like' atmosphere and simplified nitrogen and…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
The emergence of complex patterns of organization close to the Cambrian boundary is known to have happened over a (geologically) short period of time. It involved the rapid diversification of body plans and stands as one of the major…
The temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was equal to the surface temperature of Saturn's moon Titan, 94K, at a redshift z=33.5, after the first galaxies formed. Titan-like objects would have maintained this surface…
The history of the Earth has been marked by major ecological transitions, driven by metabolic innovation, that radically reshaped the composition of the oceans and atmosphere. The nature and magnitude of the earliest transitions, hundreds…
We show that a glass transition, signaled by a peak in the specific heat vs. temperature, can occur because a glassy system that shows no signs of aging progresses so slowly through the energy landscape that the time needed to obtain an…
Recently, a 30-cm object was discovered to graze the Earth's atmosphere and shift into a Jupiter-crossing orbit. We use the related survey parameters to calibrate the total number of such objects. The number of objects that could have…
We discuss 3D global simulations of the early Martian climate that we have performed assuming a faint young Sun and denser CO2 atmosphere. We include a self-consistent representation of the water cycle, with atmosphere-surface interactions,…