Episode 035 - Anne Hofmeister Shakes Up Earth Science

TSSM goes heavy: hard-hitting journalism from one of science's great controversialists, Anne Hofmeister. Intrigued? Disagree? Write me an email ([email protected]) or look her up at Washington University in St. Louis' EPS department website. The times below are keyed to the start of the interview and ignore my opening (just over 2 min). 0:00 Introduction 1:00 Anne's background (sorry, this part Anne was talking so quietly that I can't seem to fix it with Audacity, but bear with us; we moved the microphone and figured some things out and it gets better) 2:00 Spectroscopy and heat transfer 3:00 Thermal conductivity experiments and their pitfalls 5:00 Criticism of the history of thermodynamics and heat transfer; identification of light and heat 6:00 Problems with equilibrium and elastic collisions in theories of thermodynamics 8:00 Criticism of phonon theory 10:00 Electron and vibrational transfer of heat decoupled; metals and heat transfer 13:00 Garnet 14:00 Earth's interior: convection, the Rayleigh number 15:00 Viscosity 16:00 The Earth's mantle: nearly all solid 17:00 Plate tectonics without mantle convection 18:00 An even more radical idea: heat is being trapped inside the solid Earth 19:00 [there was a distortion I had to cut] 20:00 Implications: heat generation is in the crust (this part is widely known!) 21:00 Implications: the core is melting, not solidifying? 22:00 The geodynamo and magnetic field 23:00 The core: buffered at the temperature of melting high pressure iron 24:00 Magnetic modes diagram for the planets: spin and magnetic field