From the University of Wisconsin
From rocks in Colorado, evidence of a ‘chaotic solar system’
Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.
The finding, published Feb. 23, 2017 in the journal Nature, is important because it provides the first hard proof for what scientists call the “chaotic solar system,” a theory proposed in 1989 to account for small variations in the present conditions of the solar system. The variations, playing out over many millions of years, produce big changes in our planet’s climate — changes that can be reflected in the rocks that record Earth’s history.
Geoscience Professor Stephen Meyers. © GIGI COHEN
The discovery promises not only a better understanding of the mechanics of the solar system, but also a more precise measuring stick for geologic time. Moreover, it offers a better understanding of the link between orbital variations and climate change over geologic time scales.
Using evidence from alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down over millions of years in a shallow North American seaway at the time dinosaurs held sway on Earth, the team led by UW–Madison Professor of Geoscience Stephen Meyers and Northwestern University Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Brad Sageman discovered the 87 million-year-old signature of a “resonance transition” between Mars and Earth. A resonance transition is the consequence of the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory. It plays on the idea that small changes in the initial conditions of a nonlinear system can have large effects over time.
In the context of the solar system, the phenomenon occurs when two orbiting bodies periodically tug at one another, as occurs when a planet in its track around the sun passes in relative proximity to another planet in its own orbit. These small but regular ticks in a planet’s orbit can exert big changes on the location and orientation of a planet on its axis relative to the sun and, accordingly, change the amount of solar radiation a planet receives over a given area. Where and how much solar radiation a planet gets is a key driver of climate.
This animation shows a chaotic solar system and changing planetary orbits playing out over billions of years, illustrating the slight chance in the distant future of planetary collisions. Geologic evidence was recently found to confirm the idea that the planets in our solar system do not orbit the sun like clockwork in a quasiperiodic manner, as has been believed since the 18th century. Credit: Jacques Laskar
“The impact of astronomical cycles on climate can be quite large,” explains Meyers, noting as an example the pacing of the Earth’s ice ages, which have been reliably matched to periodic changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit, and the tilt of our planet on its axis. “Astronomical theory permits a very detailed evaluation of past climate events that may provide an analog for future climate.”
To find the signature of a resonance transition, Meyers, Sageman and UW–Madison graduate student Chao Ma, whose dissertation work this comprises, looked to the geologic record in what is known as the Niobrara Formation in Colorado. The formation was laid down layer by layer over tens of millions of years as sediment was deposited on the bottom of a vast seaway known as the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. The shallow ocean stretched from what is now the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, separating the eastern and western portions of North America.
“The Niobrara Formation exhibits pronounced rhythmic rock layering due to changes in the relative abundance of clay and calcium carbonate,” notes Meyers, an authority on astrochronology, which utilizes astronomical cycles to measure geologic time. “The source of the clay (laid down as shale) is from weathering of the land surface and the influx of clay to the seaway via rivers. The source of the calcium carbonate (limestone) is the shells of organisms, mostly microscopic, that lived in the water column.”
The finding is important because it provides the first hard proof for the “chaotic solar system,” a theory proposed in 1989 to account for small variations in the present conditions of the solar system.
Meyers explains that while the link between climate change and sedimentation can be complex, the basic idea is simple: “Climate change influences the relative delivery of clay versus calcium carbonate, recording the astronomical signal in the process. For example, imagine a very warm and wet climate state that pumps clay into the seaway via rivers, producing a clay-rich rock or shale, alternating with a drier and cooler climate state which pumps less clay into the seaway and produces a calcium carbonate-rich rock or limestone.”
The new study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. It builds on a meticulous stratigraphic record and important astrochronologic studies of the Niobrara Formation, the latter conducted in the dissertation work of Robert Locklair, a former student of Sageman’s at Northwestern.
Dating of the Mars-Earth resonance transition found by Ma, Meyers and Sageman was confirmed by radioisotopic dating, a method for dating the absolute ages of rocks using known rates of radioactive decay of elements in the rocks. In recent years, major advances in the accuracy and precision of radioisotopic dating, devised by UW–Madison geoscience Professor Bradley Singer and others, have been introduced and contribute to the dating of the resonance transition.
“Other studies have suggested the presence of chaos based on geologic data. But this is the first unambiguous evidence …”
Stephen Meyers
The motions of the planets around the sun has been a subject of deep scientific interest since the advent of the heliocentric theory — the idea that the Earth and planets revolve around the sun — in the 16th century. From the 18th century, the dominant view of the solar system was that the planets orbited the sun like clockwork, having quasiperiodic and highly predictable orbits. In 1988, however, numerical calculations of the outer planets showed Pluto’s orbit to be “chaotic” and the idea of a chaotic solar system was proposed in 1989 by astronomer Jacques Laskar, now at the Paris Observatory.
Following Laskar’s proposal of a chaotic solar system, scientists have been looking in earnest for definitive evidence that would support the idea, says Meyers.
“Other studies have suggested the presence of chaos based on geologic data,” says Meyers. “But this is the first unambiguous evidence, made possible by the availability of high-quality, radioisotopic dates and the strong astronomical signal preserved in the rocks.”
– See more at: http://news.wisc.edu/from-rocks-in-colorado-evidence-of-a-chaotic-solar-system/#sthash.vtKvXCKY.dpuf
h/t to Joe D’Aleo
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
how do they distinguish this effect from the Milankovich preccession effects?
I don’t know but it makes what passes for ‘climate science’ look like burning heretics on a bonfire.
And here I thought it was all the fault of CO2.
I’m not sure that Milankovich theory works as well as he tries to make out. It kinda works, except for when it doesn’t.
This is probably due to the presence of a very massive trans-neptunian object ( ie. another planet )
This has become fairly well accepted in the last year or two though the length of observations on very slow moving outer planets does not yet allow a clear indication of its current position.
Recent estimation gives 10 to 100 Earth masses ( though this range of values usually gets misreported as simply 10 EM, we still find it frightening so it has to be as small as possible ).
From what’s said it appears the Milankovitch precession effects are part of this theory. The orbits of the planets, including the axis of preccession of the planet, the preccession of the orbits and their shapes, and the orbital inclinations of each planet with respect to the sun are are all affecting each other in a chaotic way over hundreds of millions of years. Milankovitch’s theory is a bit shorter term portion of this and has specific things to say about the effects on the earth.
The classic 3 body problem taken to the nth degree. And chaotic orbits means it’s impossible to predict a specific future course of events.
When one thing zigs, while the other zags, colloquially speaking; or when one thing zigs or zags half heartedly, and the other with mucho gusto…
Even when the periods of correlation are impressive, when there are periods of weak or inverse correlation, you are looking at an influence, not a controlling effect.
Go to Leif’s website and check out his work. Correlations at the above levels make his wastebasket instantly. Even when you have correlation at .98, you cannot be sure you are lookng at control; but it is prerequisite.
Tom Halla
how do they distinguish this effect from the Milankovich preccession effects?
This is Milankovich. It leaves such a profound and repeatable signature in geological formations that it is absurd that folks are still holding out in denia1 of Milankovich orbital effects on climate and ice ages.
It also means that the Milankovich cycles and their timings can be expected to change over millions of years.
Riiiight, here’s the money graph from the paper:
While some orbital effects are undeniable, they are not controlling, and a large measure of “chaos” lies between the hypothesis and the data.
I do not see anything which is readily identifiable there. What are you seeing?
Well, when we compare a Milankovitch curve to the ice temperatures of Arctic or Antarctic curves taken from the ice cores, it does not show almost not any coincidence. If we want to save the reputation of Milankovitch we have to say, it does not affect in the poles but faintly. We should compare the curves of Milankovitch with submarine records at lower latitudes.
The problem is not with the orbital cycles described by Milankovitch and already known before him, The problem is with Milankovitch interpretation that glacial-interglacial periodicity responds to 65°N 21st June insolation. That is at its core Milankovitch’s theory, and as such it is incorrect. Glacial-interglacial periodicity responds to obliquity. It always has and it always will. And that is not what Milankovitch said. Both Antarctic cores and benthic cores support this interpretation.
http://i.imgur.com/5h2TSo3.png
When one thing zigs, while the other zags, colloquially speaking; or when one thing zigs or zags half heartedly, and the other with mucho gusto…
Even when the periods of correlation are impressive, when there are periods of weak or inverse correlation, you are looking at an influence, not a controlling effect.
Go to Leif’s website and check out his work. Correlations at the above levels make his wastebasket instantly. Even when you have correlation at .98, you cannot be sure you are lookng at control; but it is prerequisite.
Does anyone have a link to an unpaywalled version of the study itself? I can’t follow the argument here.
w.
Willis–
Here is the article:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75831381/Ma%20Meyers%20sageman%20Nature%202017.pdf
The same issue of Nature contains a second article (Tzedakis et al) that I read yesterday. Both of the articles are briefly discussed in this Nature comment.
I will put up the Tzedakis article in the next comment. The link between the two is that both deal with a sudden shift in the timing of two oscillations. The Tzedakis article deals with the more recent shift, from 41,000 years per glaciation between 2.6 and 1 million years ago to about 100,000 years over the last million years. It is a surprising example of a model with just two inputs (summertime insolation at 65N latitude and time since the last previoius deglaciation) and yet it can hit just about every glaciation over the full 2.6 million years.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75831381/Meyers%20Nature.pdf
Here is the Tzedakis article
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75831381/tZEDAKIS%20Simple%20rule%20for%20interglacial%20timing.pdf
The Tzedakis et al., 2017 article is very supportive of many of the points that I made in my October article at Judith Curry’s blog Climate Etc.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/10/24/nature-unbound-i-the-glacial-cycle/
Available as a pdf download here:
https://sabercathost.com/4Df5/Nature_unbound_1.pdf
In particular they introduce a new rule for defining interglacials and come up with the same interglacials that I identified in my article:
“A period is an interglacial if its isotopic value is below a threshold. Two isotopic minima (for example, MIS 15e and 15a) are separate interglacials if there is a local maximum above a second threshold between them; otherwise, the second isotopic minimum forms a continued interglacial (for example, MIS 7a is a continuation of MIS 7c), without a glacial termination or interglacial onset (Extended Data Figs 1–3 and Supplementary Table 1). An important aspect of this definition is the occurrence of more than one interglacial within an isotope stage—a divergence from traditional assumptions about the temporal spacing of interglacials. As a result, interglacials of the past 800 kyr (Fig. 1) do not occur every 100 kyr and are not always preceded by one of the traditionally numbered glacial terminations defined over this interval.”
Their figure 1 is essentially the same as the bottom part of my figure 5. The identification of MIS 7c, 7e, 15a, and 15c as four separate interglacials essentially destroys the 100 Kyr cycle, and they recognize it.
Their figure 2 is very, very similar to my figure 12, and they define the obliquity windows for interglacials in the same way I do:
“The onset of every interglacial occurs during intervals of above-average obliquity (>23.3°; grey shading in Fig. 2)”
I did my shading in blue and orange in figure 12. It is very strong evidence that interglacials only happen during periods of high obliquity.
Also their figure 5 with the three segments that separate failed interglacials from successful ones is very much like my figure 6, where the blue line also shows three segments at about the same time.
So all in all I could not ask for a better support for some of the most controversial parts of my article. In fact had this been published before I wrote the article, I could simply have referenced most of these things and use its figures.
An interesting conclusion of their work is that MIS 3, 50,000 years ago was very, very close to have become an interglacial, in which case we would be now in an interstadial within a glacial period. Human history would have been completely different. Either advanced civilization would have developed 40,000 years ago or would still be 30,000 years in the future. I also saw that MIS 3 was really an anomaly. Our last glacial is the first one to be 120 kyr long. It is funny how things work, because that “accident” has been determinant in the genesis of the 100 kyr cycle myth. We always give an exaggerated importance to whatever happens closest to us, like the present global warming.
Here too
Willis, I cannot see the logic of the arguments either. One example.
“The finding is important because it provides the first hard proof for the “chaotic solar system,” a theory proposed in 1989 to account for small variations in the present conditions of the solar system.”
I read a lot of hand waving and speculation, but no structure where the chaotic hypothesis could be tested.
Also the regular, repetitive sediment layers would suggest some regular and perhaps predictable cyclical process.
Another study.
I’m with you Lance. Mars is small and quite far away. Venus is closer and larger. Jupiter is further away, but MUCH larger. If planets affect Earth’s climate, Mars seems a strange candidate for the primary driver. And its orbital period — 687 days — seems not a very tidy multiple of the Earth’s 365 days. Where’s the “resonance”?. What we seem to have here is evidence of sorts for 1.2/2.4 million year (?) climate cycles in the Cretaceous. I’m fine with that. There’s abundant evidence today and in the geologic record for cyclic phenomena with periods of hundreds of thousands or millions of years. But the rest of this stuff seems to me to fall between Immanuel Velikovsky (“Worlds in Collision”) and the religious tracts produced by interpreters of the climate models. At least the climate models make sense even if they don’t seem to work very well.
Basically, the argument is that the Milankovitch Cycle calculations are not quite accurate enough and there is resonance effect from Mars that is not taken into account.
This has to be proven rather than just inferred from rock layers that really do not accurate enough dating.
The Milankovitch calculations are said to be very accurate within +/- 5 million years but I suppose they could be wrong. Proof is needed however.
You left out the effect of Jupiter’s gravity field on Earth’s orbit. It is NOT just Mars.
I can produce a chart that shows quite clearly NO regularity in length of time in any of the interglacial periods or glacial maxima over the last 600,000 years up to the present interglacial period. In regard to axial tilt, the angle of the poles move one degree every 72 years, giving a period of 25, 620 years for a full 360-degree circle. The slight change in seasonal angle toward the sun may have a great deal to do with other changes.
Bill Illis, agree with “This has to be proven rather than just inferred from rock layers that really do not accurate enough dating.”
Best proof would be finding / observations of collapsed solar solar systems due to colliding massive objects in that solar systems.
sure not any near 21st century.
Interesting article anyway – combining stratigraphic data with meteospheric / heliospheric phenomena can be useful sometimes.
From the graphs presented in the paper, I see four bumps in some rather noisy data. One of those is supposedly a bit different. They seem to be eye-balling the time interval between troughs and / or peaks in the graphs and finding they are not quite consistent. This all looks very ad hoc and subjective. I see no statistical analysis of significance and honestly with only four bumps you are not going to find any.
That is supposed to be “proof” of something / anything ?
Sara, thankyou! There was a discussion a few weeks ago on WUWT about the axis rotational period. While at PSU in late ’60’s, we used 26,000 years for the full 360 degree rotation. More recent articles are using 21,000, which I contested. But it also made me doubt by memory of nearly 50 years. Appearently my senility phase has not yet begun! 😉
26k and 21k are not the same thing.
Bill,
Both 26K and 21K cycles are correct.
The Earth’s axis completes one full cycle of precession approximately every 26,000 years. Meanwhile, the elliptical orbit rotates, more slowly, leading to a 21,000-year cycle between the seasons and the orbit.
Agree. As presented it is too too house-of-cards based on to many rabbits being plucked from assorted hats.
Most interesting post. On RV trips across the US, I have often stopped to observe the rock layers and wondered what forces were creating the periodicity in the layers. Now I have less to wonder about.
Russ, I guess I didn’t see what you saw. Is periodic or quasi-periodic behavior “hard proof” that the system is chaotic?
Leonard, can’t see that point in Russ’ comment.
Anyway there’s high probability that ‘more than 2 bodies’ problems lead to chaotic emergencies.
Newton knew the solar system was chaotic. He estimated that predictions of planetary positions more than about a billion years out, would be impossible.
Quoting him: ““the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted, which may have arisen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.”
He had the mechanism exactly right: periodic perturbations.
That quote doesn’t prove that Newton believed in a chaotic system. It only states that there are other influences on planetary movements.
Are you a liberal arts student?
Do you actually understand calculus?
It is not a matter of belief. Newton’s laws when applied correctly to a many body problem will as Newton understood, always have an outcome which was way beyond the computational power of the calculus he had developed, and he knew that.
Chaos theory is essentially a term that has been lately applied to a problem that has been known about ever since calculus was invented, namely that just because a Law is expressed in terms of a partial differential equation, which is shown to be as accurate as is is needed, unless that differential equation is linear, any result that accrues from the combination of two or more such equations cannot be simply computed.
I.e f(x + y) != f(x)+f(y)
That is, knowing that all planetary motion is totally governed by Newton’s laws, is not sufficient of and by itself to predict planetary movements with extreme precision for millions of years.
For two reasons:
The solution to the sum of two or more non linear differential equations (with respect to e.g. time) cannot be expressed as a single equation, but only as an infinite series of instantaneous solutions, which one of which depends on the solution to the previous.
This has two important qualities:
(i) you need to do a huge amount of computation to get an approximate answer. Prior to the digital computer, this was simply impossible.
(ii) where you end up depends critically on where you begin. The butterfly effect. Small errors in computing or measuring the state of the system at one point, may critically effect where it ends up. As also will lack of infinite precision in the mathematics used to compute the stages. Again peole think this is something new, but its not. Its just that since we couldn’t do millions of iterative calculations before the advent of the computer, it really wasn’t of more than academic interest.
In general the stability of such systems is not well understood, and we are not even – as far as my research has gone – even able to determine which sorts of differential equations are quasi-stable and lead to e.g. ‘planets in orbit’ and which are not.
In one of Roger Penrose’s books he makes the point that a computer large enough to predict the outcome of the monstrous non linear differential equations that comprised everything, would be as large as the Universe itself.
I am sure Douglas Adams realised this when in his fiction the earth was discovered to be simply a giant simulation experiment being run by pan dimensional white mice…
The point is this. We always have known, if we looked carefully, that this is all the case. It hasn’t been worth looking at it closer, because we didn’t have the tools to make anything of it.
Today with immense computing power perhaps we do. That’s all. Since 1970 or thereabouts the possibility of obtaining partial, more or less inaccurate solutions to some non linear differential equations has grown. Hence ‘climate change’ (still really beyond us).
Chaos theory is nothing new. What is new is that we have, with the digital computer, made very very slight inroads into partially solving a few of the more simple problems that comprise it.
This particular problem is worrhy of note because planetary orbits on 9-10 planets all of which obey Newtonian or Einsteinian mathematics is a relatively simple system and it should be possible to construct a model and run it backwards to validate against geologic data, and run it forward to see where we end up.
This is not however a new theory. merely the application of raw modern computing power to an old problem that we didn’t have the means to tackle hitherto. And one more likley to yield interesting results than trying to predict climate change with GCMs.
GCMS are essentially all about predicting the overall effective albedo of the earth given a more or less constant solar input. This would be about calculating the solar input variability.
Leo, excellent explanation.
GCMs are like trying to model the SS without knowing the mass of the planets nor having an accurate value for the position and velocity of any of the planets as a starting point and only having a rough idea of the value of the gravitational constant.
In fact Newton did not have an accurate value for the planetary masses but was still able to get further than GCMs which do not even get the first ten years of a run right.
“other influences” exactly what produces chaotic outcomes, or Newton’s reformation.
Chaos is a modern concoction. It only appeared after the rejection of Einstein’s
“God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”
Chaos is only a modern concoction in the sense that its a new name for an old problem. Cf the ‘three body problem’
Its advent is not associated with anything Einstein had to say, because it is in fact Turing’s godchild. IN two ways. First of all his theories of incomputability were the forerunner of the analysis of just how far maths and logic could go, and chaos is on the edge of that, and secondly because its the advent of digital computers based on ‘Turing machine’ principles that made chaos theory relevant as just as the power of computers opened up new areas, we ran head on into the chaos we had always avoided before, because we didn’t have the computing power to get to it .
WE are now is as much of a mess as Newton was when before years of bum-scratching he came up with the calculus of infinitesimals – the analytic tool that drove science for the next 400 years.
Today the cutting edge of science is in a real mess. We have phenomena for which no coherent universal theory exists in quantum physics, and we have theories that are as true as any scientific theory can be (when tested in simple experiment, they give the right result) but are totally useless in the real world, because they occur in combinations that render the resultant mixture beyond the power of computational analysis, and chaotic. CO2 climate change is a classic example. You can prove that CO2 interacts with radiation in specific ways, but that actually gives no inkling whatsoever of whether its increase in the atmosphere will lead to any climatic effects at all.
IN fact its likely its effect on vegetation and photosynthesis will be far more dominant – it may well change the flora distribution and hence fauna distribution of the planet.
One way of looking at fossil fuel is that it represents a fertilizer that until Nature invented Man, was locked away to the point where plants were dying from lack of CO2.
Burning it has re-greened the planet.
This is a partial differential equation. We say more CO2= more plants. Like AGW says more CO2 = higher temps = less plants.
If more vegetation lowers temperatures by e.g. promoting evaporative losses from the tropics then the world might get colder.
So we can make plausible cases for CO2 making the world cooler instead of hotter.
Which effect dominates (if either are significant) is where we throw our hands up in horror and say ‘me head hurts’
My point is finally this: Just because some journalist or some magazine with copy to sell represents something as old as Calculus as ‘new’ doesn’t mean it is so.
There is – and its typified by the climate change thing) a serious existential crisis in the whole of Western thought.
Science has so to speak picked all the low hanging fruit, and what’s left are a core of seriously hard problems., some of which, like quantum physics, challenge the very understanding of the nature of the world we think we are investigating.
With sciences absolute replacement of an intelligent willful God, with blind mechanistic forces of Nature, we have lost our moral sense as a culture, and into the vacuum has been poured the faux morality and the specious psychology of Marxism and other politics of discontent, what our American readers would recognise as Liberalism, or what we in Europe tend to call Socialism.
And this is a far greater crisis. If science, having killed God, is now seen to be fatally flawed, it opens the door to any post truth mumbo jumbo, as being ‘of equivalent truth content’.
If science is no better than the Koran at predicting climate, why not learn the Koran instead….its a LOT easier.
@ur momisugly Leo Smith
The above is an exceptionally great commentary and I thank you for posting it.
The brilliance in/of a simple statement of fact, to wit:
Leo Smith
February 25, 2017 at 2:31 am
Thanks Leo for your write up. I understand the perspective from where you are coming from. The perspective that I have taken is much too complex to be laid out in a blog format. I will only leave this reference about where we are in science – Aristotle is probably rolling in his grave and Epicurus is laughing away.
@Leopold Danze Smith
“… And this is a far greater crisis. If science, having killed God, is now seen to be fatally flawed, it opens the door to any post truth mumbo jumbo, as being ‘of equivalent truth content’.”
The problem with the AGW crowd is the belief in the theory itself justifies any methodology. They do not recognize any external value system which imposes limits. Their “models” are vast, sophisticated tautologies. But every skeptical argument stems from the idea that there are principled external limits. This is a moral battle.
I will agree with you on that. Your other comment concerning Newton’s reformation I believe pertains to the hand of God intervening to maintain planetary orbital stability.
Newton lived in a far different time. He was born in the same year that Galileo died — 1642. That’s about 30 years after Kepler determined that planets traveled in elliptical orbits around the sun. Newton and his contemporaries were still trying to sort out the complexities of a heliocentric universe. The concept of chaotic motion would probably have made sense to him. He was a brilliant guy. But he was mostly trying to make sense out of stuff that seems obvious to us today, but was anything but obvious at the time.
What Newton was trying to do was to find a way to express a relationship that he already knew worked pretty well. That elliptical orbits with equal areas traversed in equal time was pretty close. That in itself leads more or less directly to the idea of a force as that which produces a change in motion, being some form of inverse square law.
The rest of his genius was in inventing almost simultaneously with Leibnitz, the ‘Calculus of the infinitesimals’ – a mathematical trick that solved the problem of expressing – in the case of differential calculus – the change in one thing with respect to another at any given point.
The fact that chaos is the inevitable result of so doing when applied to multiple differentials that are not linear, is inherent in the Calculus itself.
This is what wiki has to say about the most basic three body problem
The three body problem is the oldest and simplest chaotic problem. Newton was aware of it completely.
In a Sherlock Holmes story, Holmes says to Watson, “It’s always obvious to you, after I’ve explained it”. We can substitute Newton for Holmes in this instance.
So is this saying that they have observed from geology (!) that planets don’t orbit the Sun in accordance with Newtonian physics – moderated by relativity for Mercury – but by a chaotic mathematical model?
This seems remarkable from the viewpoint that we have managed to derive physics from observations in the first place. And also from the fact that the solar system has been stable for a very long time.
This doesn’t make sense to me.
Please try and explain how they have derived Chaos in the movement of the planets.
I found this… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System
I know, it’s Wikipedia but, it sounds like what this article is talking about. Also, It doesn’t seem like we have anything to worry about anytime soon.
I recently put a practical observation made by some Inuit hunters from the NWT (Nunavut) on my site, simply because I’ve been out on the land with some of these guys in the past and know their practical understanding of their high arctic environment. Not sure why they came to that conclusion, other than they did. I just found it an interesting observation. Would that mean that the South pole gets the opposite effect?
https://notonmywatch.com/?p=1088
“I recently put a practical observation made by some Inuit hunters from the NWT (Nunavut) on my site …”
I can believe likely that something is going on up there, but it’s unlikely to be a sudden shift in the Earth’s orbital parameters. That’d cause a multitude of effects including causing every astronomical telescope to be pointed at the wrong place and satellite acquisition tables (used for satellite tracking and commanding) to point the antennas at places the satellites aren’t. People would notice. GPS would presumably stop working right as well. I’m sure folks would notice.
They observed that the stars are rising at different places on the horizon. That would be caused by atmospheric refraction if the air is warmer and/or more humid. I trust their observations.
I don’t think the planet has shifted much in its orbit over the last few hundred years. We use astronomical tables, calculated in advance, for navigation. We do avoid using stars near the horizon because of atmospheric refraction.
If the planet’s orbit had changed, we would have noticed and we would have the data to prove it.
“They observed that the stars are rising at different places on the horizon. That would be caused by atmospheric refraction if the air is warmer and/or more humid. I trust their observations.”
They also claim that the sun is coming higher in the sky. That is not true, and cannot be due to refraction. So I don’t trust their observations.
In the arctic the sun spends the majority of its time less than 20 deg above the horizon. That’s in the zone that navigators don’t trust because of atmospheric refraction. It’s quite possible the sun would appear too high in the sky.
If I had to choose between you and old Levi to keep me alive in the arctic, the choice would be easy.
I hope you are aware that refraction increases at lower temperatures, so if it causes the sun to appear to come higher in the Arctic it means that it is getting colder there. If I femember rightly the largest refraction ever recorded by a navigator was during one of Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions.
And as for keeping You alive in the Arctic I’m far from sure whether I could, but so far I have at least managed to keep myself alive both there and in the Antarctic.
Just quoting what tty posted
Sounds to me like the simple answer to their observed changes could be a localized case of subduction or uplift that caused a slight “tilting” and/or ”twisting” of the surface.
Keeping “track” of observed star movement led to many discoveries in ancient times.
That’s why I have always figured that the Great Pyramid of Giza was originally constructed to be used as a, per se, “reflecting telescope”.
Other than the Eskimos, it is very rare to meet people capable of keeping themselves alive in the arctic without outside intervention. Most of those people were trained by the Eskimos.
https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2011/tremaine-solar-system
Something else that seems related.
My understanding is that besides Newtonian physics and relativity, resonance between the earth and other planets occurs over millions of years to produce other effects. This would be just like a small push on a swing at the right times producing a huge height at some point. Similarly, appropriate tugs between Mars and Earth produce interesting results after millions of years. I do not then see why tugs between Earth and Venus and Saturn and Jupiter would also not affect things in a similar manner.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5996
SMC:
Thanks for this reference. It’s a beautiful historical treatment of the work of Lagrange and Laplace on the calculations of the perturbations due to Jupiter and Saturn.
Here is the conclusion of the beautiful article by Laskar in the arxiv reference provided by SMC.
With the JADE machine, we were able to simulate 2501 different solutions of the
movement of the planets of the whole Solar System on 5 billion years, corresponding
to the life expectancy of the system, before the Sun becomes a red giant. The
2501 computed solutions are all compatible with our current knowledge of the Solar
System. They should thus be considered as equiprobable outcomes of the future of the
Solar System. In most of the solutions, the trajectories continue to evolve as in the
current few millions of years : the planetary orbits are deformed and precess under
the influence of the mutual perturbations of the planets but without the possibility
of collisions or ejections of planets outside the Solar System. Nevertheless, in 1%
of the cases, the eccentricity of Mercury increases considerably. In many cases, this
deformation of the orbit of Mercury then leads to a collision with Venus, or with the
Sun in less than 5 Ga, while the orbit of the Earth remained little affected. However,
for one of these orbits, the increase in the eccentricity of Mercury is followed by an
increase in the eccentricity of Mars, and a complete internal destabilization of the
inner Solar System (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) in about 3.4 Gyr. Out of 201
additional cases studied in the vicinity of this destabilization at about 3.4 Gyr, 5
ended by an ejection of Mars out of the Solar System. Others lead to collisions
between the planets, or between a planet and the Sun in less than 100 million
years. One case resulted in a collision between Mercury and Earth, 29 cases in a
collision between Mars and the Earth and 18 in a collision between Venus and the
Earth (Laskar and Gastineau, 2009). Beyond this spectacular aspect, these results
validate the methods of semi-analytical averaging developed for more than 20 years
and which had allowed, 15 years ago, to show the possibility of collision between
Mercury and Venus (Laskar, 1994).
These results also answer to the question raised more than 300 years ago by
Newton, by showing that collisions among planets or ejections are actually possible
within the life expectancy of the Sun, that is, in less than 5 Gyr. The main surprise
that comes from the numerical simulations of the recent years is that the probability
for this catastrophic events to occur is relatively high, of the order of 1%, and thus
not just a mathematical curiosity with extremely low probability values. At the
same time, 99% of the trajectories will behave in a similar way as in the recent past
millions of years, which is coherent with our common understanding that the Solar
System has not much evolved in the past 4 Gyr. What is more surprising is that
if we consider a pure Newtonian world, the probability of collisions within 5 Gyr
grows to 60 %, which can thus be considered as an additional indirect conrmation
of general relativity.
We “have managed to derive physics from observations” over a very short period, indeed. We have no assurance that even our physical constants are “constant” over a “very long (cosmological) time”. It is convenient to make the assumption that “the solar system has been stable for a very long time.”
I think rather it is saying that the three (or more) body problem produces chaotic changes in orbits in the truly mathematical sense.
“So is this saying that they have observed from geology (!) that planets don’t orbit the Sun in accordance with Newtonian physics – moderated by relativity for Mercury – but by a chaotic mathematical model?”
No. Geology doesn’t tell us this,
What you observe from geology is alternating sediments…clay rich and carbonate rich.
Then you start inferring things.
The clay rich sediments may indicate a wetter climate, higher stream flow. The carbonate rich sediments may indicate a drier, and possibly cooler, climate.
What causes these fluctuations in an otherwise fairly stable tectonic environment ?
This is where the arm wavers come in.
Do Milankovich precession effects provide enough variation?
if not, as is apparently suggested, then something else is required.
Does gravity interplay between Earth and Mars, or Earth and Venus for that matter, provide enough extra wiggles in Earth’s orbit to explain the variation?
Maybe
I understood that it was the coming and going of a shallow sea that caused these alternating sources for sedimentary layers.
During the last big ice age of 360 million yrs ago which lasted 60 million yrs, it was the rhythmic retreat and
return of the sea over flat land that created these alternating shale and limestone sediments.
Carbonate sediments are of oceanic origin made from calciferous parts of dead organisms that sink to the bottom of shallow seas.
Clay deposits are from land based sources and create mudflats, marsh and swamp at shore lines.
During the warmer interstadials global sea levels rose due to the icecaps loosing mass. The shore line in tropical America very slowly moved inland and any vegetation and its peat deposits were submerged to be eventually covered in carbonate sediments.
During the colder stadials sea levels dropped due to the icecaps gaining mass. The shoreline very slowly retreated and the flat lands and swamps with its vegetation and creation of peat deposits followed the retreat to be eventually covered in clay deposits.
The accumulation of these sediments from alternating sources with peat layers sandwiched in between grew many layers thick.
The subsequent pressure and heat on these peat layers produced the coal seams and the cheap energy it
provides today.
The alternating type of sediments the authors refer to could simply be a symptom of periodic retreats and advances of the sea without the coal fillings in the sandwich.
“Please try and explain how they have derived Chaos in the movement of the planets.”
Chaos itself doesn’t imply a negative connotation.
Think of everyday crowded pavements in NY City.
I did not mean that chaos had a negative connotation. Just that the planets were so non-chaotic that we were able to create classical physics.
Others on this thread have said that the 3-body problem can become significant even in the solar system.
OK. I’ll go with the “maybe”.
And at least my comment led to a decent discussion.
That’s what it seems to be saying which as you rightly say is senseless.
What is the case is that Newtonian mechanics if applied correctly lead to chaotic motion.
And someone realised this and thought they had had a New Thought. Whereas Newton knew it from the start.
The N-body problem is chaotic with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and indeed by positions, masses, and velocities of each body.
I ran three body simulations (using only Newtonian gravity) with two large bodies and an Earth sized body and differences in any parameter of as little as 0.01% created drastic differences in outcome. In fact when I was using close-in starting orbits, the round off error of double precision variables created some extremely non-physical results.
For giggles I did one run with a star sized object cruising by from infinity to about 100AU to infinity again (used 10000AU as infinity because I don’t have infinite time – it was only moving 0.1c) on one of the stable configurations I had found and it completely collapsed the system. I never ran it with more than that one 4 body case because it really slowed down the processor and I was trying to test 1000 cases before I had to present it.
My conclusion: N-body problems are easily perturbable.
They measured differences in the character(slate or limestone) and the thickness(and probably isotope ratios and anything else they could measure that might be relevant) of sedimentary layers and found that they did not vary in a stable way. Stable here means repeatable and unchanging . the sediment variations turned out to be not really repeatable and the variations changed with time- hence chaotic.
It also means that the length of observations has to be long enough that instabilities can show up. A ‘short’ period of observations- one not long enough to capture variations and repeatability, won’t tell you anything useful.
That’s the problem with climate. Modern science has maybe 40 years of measurement in a system that varies on a near daily basis. The paleo records show some stability over 2-3 million years. This study seems to show that that short period of stability probably isn’t guaranteed.
The sun has also been losing mass, which affects the orbits. Eventually it will expand to consume the inner planets.
…at the same time the Earth has been gaining mass at the surface.
Shoemaker did calculations for the in-falling meteorites and space dust some
years ago.
What if the Earth gained significant mass from something like a large nickel iron meteorite impact at some stage in the past – say the Pre Cambrian – that would really scare the (proto) chickens.
This doesn’t seem far fetched to me. Over millennia, gravitational interactions with neighboring planets could change the orbit enough to influence albedo. Similar to the Milankovich cycles. Just wondering.
So, my question is, how does the magic molecule, CO2, fit into all this?
SMC
All those later Cretaceous SUVs! The clay! The limestone!
Ohhh, goodness, yes.
The science is settled.
Mods – if you think you detected a little /Sarc – you’re wrong. Waaa-aaay off.
#There was a great big shed-load of /Sarc there!
And thanks for your work.
Auto
But an interesting post. Can periodic perturbations get Mars inside Earth’s orbit? Over billions of years? An interesting though.
SMC’s earlier comment – “Also, It doesn’t seem like we have anything to worry about anytime soon.” certainly seems apposite.
It drives the whole thing, of course. Smart little bugger!
“Where and how much solar radiation a planet gets is a key driver of climate.”
Everybody knows that is not true. CO2 is the only driver of climate.
thought dammit
Auto
Too much wine? 🙂
Cyclicity in the geologic rock record is nothing new. Recognized from the very early days of the budding geology science the relationship between rhythmic juxtaposition of (In this case) clay/sand with carbonate rich sediments begged for an explanation. Even the earliest geologists hypothesized that it hinted at climate as a driver. Ancient glaciation was often the proposed driver. As research progressed, better investigative tools were devised and this paper is just another in a a long line of improved radiometric studies that continue to refine our understanding of the time periods involved. Although I can only read the abstract and look at the figures, the authors are attempting to correlate solar system effects with the deposition cycles. The Niobrara Formation is a good package of rocks to do this type of a study. Throughout the section are numerous volcanic ash layers (bentonites) that can be radiometrically dated with fairly good resolution (+/- 500,000 to 800,000 yrs or better) that provides a good framework for a higher resolution analysis.
As an aside, oil & gas geologists have been using these bentionites to help correlate portions of the formation across 100’s of miles. One specific bentionite (called the “X” bentionite) can be correlated from northern New Mexico all the way into the middle part of eastern Wyoming, if not further north.
Let’s wait till Mars is a couple miles away, and then visit it easily.
Daniel
I also don’t see the point in sending anyone to Mars [part of a TV show?] unless you first created an atmosphere there to protect you against the sun’s most harmful rays…
Anthony
It did not occur to me to just cut and paste the whole UW press release when I submitted the same story earlier today.
A prominent current theory, widely accepted, is that early in solar system history the outer, gas-giant plants were not located where they are now. Orbital interactions among these planets cause Uranus and Neptune to move outward, thereby disrupting the outer, smaller bodies, flinging them widely into the present Oort cloud. Jupiter and Saturn may even have changed positions relative to the Sun. Jupiter moved inward, and its orbital resonance with the asteroid belt caused many of these objects to be flung inward, bombarding the inner solar system, and producing most very large craters on the Moon.
How’s that for chaos?
Interesting use of the word ‘chaotic’ here. Especially regarding the Pluto orbit. Perhaps what it really means is that we don’t really know about all the (very) fine points of orbital mechanics, the various celestial bodies equations of motion or even if we know all the masses involved (ie extra solar masses which drift into the Solar influence occasionally). In other words chaos is a word to use when we just don’t know.
Please: Chaos is a word with a specific meaning.
It is the in-computable and imprecise results of exact and precise deterministic relationships.
It’s what happens when we know exactly what’s going on, but still cant predict where stuff will end up.
Like balancing a pencil on its point. Fully described by Newtonian mechanics
You know its gonna fall over and you probably can define a circle inside with it will fall, but to predict exactly where it falls is completely impossible.
Same goes for thrown dice.
They are not random, but they might as well be.
“There is a clear distinction between looking for information consistent with a theory (not science) ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune
You actually do both.
Mosher
Firstly you only got half the quote – incomplete comparative. Secondly, Wikipedia is not a credible reference at self respecting institutions of higher learning in the developed economies – hasn’t been for a decade plus – a look at the propaganda garbage on subject of “climate change” will tell you why.
Not Forrest.. You can construe the motives ( what and why you look) any unscientific way you want.
FACTUALLY, based on observation of what scientists do, they look for evidence than confirms ( hey my prediction Worked) and evidence that disconfirms.
Popper was wrong. observationally incorrect
You could alao look at eddingtons confirmations of einstein.
Say again?
Yeah
He has gone to lala land.
I’m delighted to see a real ‘hard science’ story attributed to University of Wisconsin – Madison!
As an alum, I dread the usual story from UW – Madtown , as we saw here just 6 days ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/02/18/silly-pr-communications-expert-explains-how-science-should-respond-to-fake-news/
Once again, on the face of it, someone is looking for a tiny extrinsic spark that somehow meets up with an intrinsic system to drive large changes (one or two CO2 molecules, a spike in the Sun now and then, solar wind upticks, some sort of barycenter, etc). All of that minutia leads proponents to arguing over how many of “their” fairies are dancing on the head of a pin. Meanwhile the huge liquid elephant in the room goes on about its business roaring around messing things up eating everything in sight or taking up all the couch space fast asleep heating up the house. Sigh.
Thank you for a most sensible post.
I just shrugged. Did I cause or did I prevent the Earth from colliding with another planet in X-billion years?
No. Like the butterfly’s wing flaps, it’s quickly swamped by effects orders of magnitude larger.
No. You caused it! 🙂
@noaaprogrammer.. Atlas!.. is that you? Ayn? 🙂
Yep – you guessed’er Chester!
Is that the huge liquid pink elephant?
Chaos explains the lack of understanding of the observed. My apologies to ever said this first, I don’t remember your name.
Not 90 mil, but some interesting stuff on the Norse in Greenland from the Smithsonian.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/
We have gathered data from sources like the Pioneer space probes which suggest we do not even fully understand how gravity works. Add in countless unknown forces applied as the entire Solar system orbits the Galactic center(s) and any posturing about definitive answers to climate variability becomes suspect.
Finding something suspect, being sceptical; good agent for earnest science, basic research.
https://youtu.be/Dts7up5B-Y0?t=1m23s
Some have speculated that when two charged bodies get that close, there could be a spark. Observations in close encounters within the solar system have been supportive.
Perhaps there’s a book in the offing. (: Use caution though. Some titles on the subject are not available because they have already been used.
Its called ‘Worlds in Collision’ .
Immanual Velikovsky wrote it in …1950?
Ha ha. I see what you did there.
That would be the Carl’s Senior burger.
Climate change skeptics say that fluctuations in the earth’s climate are caused by variations in the output of the sun. Alarmists respond by stating that variations in solar luminosity and the average solar constant of 1,368 W/m^2 are too small to make much difference. They are both correct and yet both of those explanations are inaccurate and incomplete.
What both sides forgot to mention is that the earth does not orbit in a nice average circle, but in an ellipse:
1) closer to the sun at perihelion, 1/4/17, and hotter with a solar non-constant of 1,415 W/m^2,
2) and farther at aphelion, 7/3/17, and colder with a solar non-constant of 1,323 W/m^2
3) for a total variation of 92 W/m^2.
What both sides also forget to mention is that because of the tilted axis and spherical shape the total insolation arriving at the top of the atmosphere fluctuates by around 670 W/m^2. What are the consequences of that large fluctuation? Winter and summer which the earth has survived for thousands of millennia.
Per IPCC AR5 between 1750 and 2011, 261 years, assuming all natural processes remained constant, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide rose due to human processes, i.e. fossil fuel and land use changes, from 278 ppm to 391 ppm. The consequence to the atmospheric heat balance of 261 years’ worth of additional carbon dioxide was 2 W/m^2. (IPCC AR5 SPM.5)
If the 92 W/m^2 fluctuation due to orbit and a 670 W/m^2 fluctuation due to tilt and shape have no catastrophic consequences what should we reasonably expect from 2?
BTW 1,415, 1,323, 92, 670 W/m^2 are real numbers based on real physical parameters, real math, and confirmed by real measurements. IPCC’s 2 W/m^2 is based on a conceptual model such as Kiehl-Trenberth’s power flux graphic diagram, i.e. a ball suspended in a hot fluid, with no consideration of orbit, tilt, night and day, and bearing no resemblance to the actual earth.
Not so much. Some folks say that sunspots indirectly influence the intensity of cosmic rays that reach the Earth’s surface thereby changing the clouds which affects the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface. Pretty much everyone agrees that the solar constant is pretty much constant. 🙂
Is swinging 92 W/m^2 per year “constant?”
Climate change skeptics say that fluctuations in the earth’s climate are caused by variations in the output of the sun.
Speak for yourself, not for others.
In the absence of any clear proof, sceptics are sceptical as to whether the sun is a major influence. That is why they are called sceptics.
What you said was:
That statement is wrong. The sun’s output changes very little. The energy received at the top of the atmosphere does change due to the fact that the planet’s orbit is not circular. link
Breaking the car to standstill has ‘catastrophic consequences’ to the car’s velocity.
Again, terms like catastrophe / turning to another state or phase / or chaos don’t mandatory imply a negative connotation.
“They are both correct and yet both of those explanations are inaccurate and incomplete”
One is inaccurate, the other incomplete, no matter which side of the argument you sit.
My computations are that solar variance can straight forwardly explain about 1%3 the ~ 0.3% total variation we’ve seen — which is less than 1%4 the variation from peri- to ap- helion .
Hey! Maybe planets affect the solar climate too! Who’d a thunk it?
Oh oh. Here comes catastrophic anthropogenic orbit change.
Will that be $4billion per day to fix?
Catastrophic heliocentric anthropogenic orbit slippage. We’re all doomed.
CHAOS!!! I like it!!!!
Now all we need to do is get funding.:)
so how long have these guys been reading Velekovsky?
Until they ceased creationism ?
Don’t want to go in an argument – but basic research is always suspect – and should be.