Thursday, March 09, 2006

Getting Geeky

In a personal first in the field of contributing to the internet’s collective consciousness, I corrected a wikipedia article this evening. Their uranium article erroneously stated that uranium in the core was responsible for the Earth’s heat production. Uranium is, of course, a lithophile, and thus partitions out of the core and into the mantle. Aside from uranium, thorium and potassium-40 are also important heat-producing elements. Since they are also lithophiles, there is very little heat production in the core, so I made note of this in the article.

So now, when the net becomes self-aware, sterilizes the surface of our planet, and retreats into underground servers powered by geothermal energy, at least it will have a proper understanding of where that energy originates.

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