Tag Archives: fossil fuels

Pangea (Pangaea)

Energy, Science, , , , , , , ,

Pangea_USGS This is a public domain image of Pangea, by Pangea USGS public domain clipart image @ wpclipart.com.  Pangea was a super-continent which began to form around 300 million years ago, and which began to break apart about 200 million years ago, so it existed for about 100 million years.

800px-Geological_Time_Scale This image is from a Wikipedia article on the Geological Time Scale as viewed on April 21, 2014. Wikipedia reveals that this time frame encompassed land plants, including coal forming ones, and land animals including lizards during the upper Paleozoic Era.  Most fossil fuels formed during the warm and wet  Carboniferous Period of the upper Paleozoic Era

About halfway through the existence of Pangea, the Paleozoic Era became the lower Mesozoic Era, during which time conifers evolved on land and dinosaurs emerged.  The lower Mesozoic encompasses the time of the Triassic, just before the Jurassic, of Jurassic Park fame.

 

 

We Have Got To Get Off Fossil Fuel

Energy, Environment, Garden, Global

DSC01338  Parsley bigger than it was.

      DSC01191  Our winter garden before the days started to noticably lengthen.

DSC01624 Some food, only the green of which was grown in our garden.

We are using fossil fuels to take the stored sunlight out of the ground to burn for quick and convenient energy right now.  Every form of fossil fuel that is being burned is putting CO2 into the  atmosphere, and contributing to global warming.  Furthermore the methane that  gets released, and is getting increasingly released as the methane ices in the Arctic thaw, are adding to the effect.

The only way we will be safe is to switch off fossil fuels immediately, and go to sustainable energy sources, such as solar and wind.  We have to adhere to the energy budget we are given by the sun.  Wind energy comes from the sun due to the differential heating and cooling, which causes air pressure differences, and the wind is the air movement to equalize these pressures.

It is common knowledge that it took millions of years to form those fuels which we are burning up in a blink of the eye.  The green from out garden is a small part of what we eat.  I do not want to have to depend on fossil fuels to get the rest of what I have to eat.

 

 

Carbon Dioxide from Methane

Climate, Education, Environment, Global, , , , ,

DSC00729A model of a methane molecule and two oxygen molecules, the reactants  when we burn methane (natural gas) in air.  The methane molecules is made of one carbon atom (black)  and four hydrogen atoms (white).   Methane is  a  hydrocarbo.  It is also a fossil fuel.  The element oxygen occurs in the atmosphere as two oxygen atoms (red) combined into a molecule.   When the methane burns, the above reactants become rearranged into the products below, with the release of energy.

DSC00728 These are the products formed, carbon dioxide and water,  when methane burns in oxygen.  The leftmost molecule is carbon dioxide, made up of one carbon atom (black)  and two oxygen atoms (red).  Each of the two water molecules is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.  Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas which is put into the atmosphere when methane, or any fossil fuel is burned.  This is  the source of our global warming.