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Current Events » in reply to re: The point; simplified.

re: The point; simplified.
gbaikie — (archived)

Back in 1996 a friend of mine sent me a e-mail saying that; "scientists have found that oxygen is escaping into space from the polar regions of the ionosphere at a rate of about 5*(10 to the 7th power) kg per year, but this loss is counterbalanced by the dissociation of water vapor."

50 million kg or 50,000 tonnes. Hmm, don't know. But let's just say it is correct. A cubic km of water is billion cubic meters or about billion tonnes. Oxygen is most of the weight of water- to keep round numbers we let it be all the weight of water, so for every 20,000 years you would lose cu km of water. On global scale and human timescale this is insignificant.
But let's just continue a bit further, in 20 million years you lose 1000 cubic km of water- about 20 km sq of deep ocean- again a fairly insignificant amount of the total ocean. If you times this by 10 or 100 [200 million- 2 billion years] you are running into events like huge impactors and super volcanos whose affects would dwarf any significant regarding this process.

Additionally, 50,000 tonnes of water vapor is a small percentage of yearly quantity of water vapor in the Earth atmosphere- I'm not going to do the math, but I would very surprised if it was more .1 percent. Though sucking this much water vapor out a region could have a significant effect of *some kind*- meaning that if this quantity water of this kind of scale varied e.g. due to say max/min of solar activity. [And by region I mean polar area or say water vapor at high altitude.]

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