Maybe you were born to repeat. There are, after all, only so many ways to do things. What’s that? Yes, you are correct. A piano has only 88 keys; yet, there seem to be endless numbers of songs. Of course, we should acknowledge that among all the songs, even those that seem highly original, there lies some predictable set of notes, a subtle repetition of notes found in other songs. Right. Calling into question a single musical phrase doesn’t call into question the whole song’s originality.
But you grew up on a planet that likes to recycle. Take the seasons, for example. True, Earth has places that seem to alter very little through a year, but subtle changes in weather are both measurable and noticeable, at least to long-term residents. On Earth, you are a long-term resident, so you should be able to detect subtle changes throughout a year’s worth of seasons just as you detect subtle changes in the notes of different songs. And what about subtle changes, say, between one winter and the next, or one summer and another five years later, big symphonies of sound? “Why,” you remark, “when I was a child, I had to walk through snow up to my waist.” (Of course, you are taller now)
So, what’s with the weather? It’s always a topic. Does it cycle beyond the time of an individual life? And what would cause such long-separated parts of such a cycle? Could the weather be influenced by giant gravitational systems far removed from the planet itself? Enter Zhiren Joseph Wang and Xiaopei Lin, the former from the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at NC State and the latter from the Physical Oceanography Laboratory of China’s Ocean University in Qingdao. In 2015 the two published an article on magma motion and sun-moon gravitation that links both to paleoclimatic changes.* They note that paleoclimate data suggest Earth undergoes variations on the order of every 23,000 years, 40,000 years, and 100,000 years, periods associated with Sun-moon-Earth orbits and orientations (Milankovich cycles). Okay, enough of the long-winded stuff.
Short form: It seems possible that the Earth-moon-sun gravitational relationship affects magma motion (that’s the mushy hot stuff that emerges to become volcanic lavas) within our planet. Magma’s heat, the authors hypothesize, could be the engine that drives a long-term periodicity in climate. Climate changes, the researchers seem to argue, have external and internal drivers.
We don’t have to belabor that point. What we might want to note is that we live on a planet of cycles, and that might be why, in our evolutionary history, we have a tendency to do things over—and over, and over, and over. We can ask ourselves about what influences our personal cycling of emotions, ways of thinking, and preferences. Like our planet, are there two causes of our cycling? Earth is influenced by sun and moon. They impose a cycle (even if one considers the simple cycle of ocean tides). Earth’s weather, a surface process, is partly driven by the movement of something deep within that Wang and Lin tie to sun and moon.
If we want to understand ourselves and if we acknowledge that we do run through cycles of various kinds, shouldn’t we, after identifying our “cycles,” ask which are driven from within and which from without? We might not be able to avoid the sources of our cycling, but we can understand them enough to make subtle changes that only we as individuals can detect just as we know when a song is original or the weather is different.
* https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2015/536829/ Astronomy and Climate-Earth System: Can Magma Motion under Sun-Moon Gravitation Contribute to Paleoclimatic Variations and Earth’s Heat?in Advances in Astronomy Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 536829, 10 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/536829
But you grew up on a planet that likes to recycle. Take the seasons, for example. True, Earth has places that seem to alter very little through a year, but subtle changes in weather are both measurable and noticeable, at least to long-term residents. On Earth, you are a long-term resident, so you should be able to detect subtle changes throughout a year’s worth of seasons just as you detect subtle changes in the notes of different songs. And what about subtle changes, say, between one winter and the next, or one summer and another five years later, big symphonies of sound? “Why,” you remark, “when I was a child, I had to walk through snow up to my waist.” (Of course, you are taller now)
So, what’s with the weather? It’s always a topic. Does it cycle beyond the time of an individual life? And what would cause such long-separated parts of such a cycle? Could the weather be influenced by giant gravitational systems far removed from the planet itself? Enter Zhiren Joseph Wang and Xiaopei Lin, the former from the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at NC State and the latter from the Physical Oceanography Laboratory of China’s Ocean University in Qingdao. In 2015 the two published an article on magma motion and sun-moon gravitation that links both to paleoclimatic changes.* They note that paleoclimate data suggest Earth undergoes variations on the order of every 23,000 years, 40,000 years, and 100,000 years, periods associated with Sun-moon-Earth orbits and orientations (Milankovich cycles). Okay, enough of the long-winded stuff.
Short form: It seems possible that the Earth-moon-sun gravitational relationship affects magma motion (that’s the mushy hot stuff that emerges to become volcanic lavas) within our planet. Magma’s heat, the authors hypothesize, could be the engine that drives a long-term periodicity in climate. Climate changes, the researchers seem to argue, have external and internal drivers.
We don’t have to belabor that point. What we might want to note is that we live on a planet of cycles, and that might be why, in our evolutionary history, we have a tendency to do things over—and over, and over, and over. We can ask ourselves about what influences our personal cycling of emotions, ways of thinking, and preferences. Like our planet, are there two causes of our cycling? Earth is influenced by sun and moon. They impose a cycle (even if one considers the simple cycle of ocean tides). Earth’s weather, a surface process, is partly driven by the movement of something deep within that Wang and Lin tie to sun and moon.
If we want to understand ourselves and if we acknowledge that we do run through cycles of various kinds, shouldn’t we, after identifying our “cycles,” ask which are driven from within and which from without? We might not be able to avoid the sources of our cycling, but we can understand them enough to make subtle changes that only we as individuals can detect just as we know when a song is original or the weather is different.
* https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2015/536829/ Astronomy and Climate-Earth System: Can Magma Motion under Sun-Moon Gravitation Contribute to Paleoclimatic Variations and Earth’s Heat?in Advances in Astronomy Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 536829, 10 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/536829
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