I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Boron Zone. It has a range of scientists studying all different topics. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
That’s a good question, and I don’t really know. The earth is so huge, it seems that it would be hard for humans to have any significant impact in this manner. However, I am aware that in a region in New Zealand where geothermal energy / water is used that there have been reports of an overall decline in what is available. Although how much of this is due to humans and how much is due to natural variability is debatable.
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I don’t know, I guess it would depend on how many holes and how much heat they bring out from underground
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A very good question. When we extract heat (geothermal energy) from a hole in the ground, we must be cooling that little bit of the earth around the hole. Now, the earth contains rather a lot of heat, so we’re not going to run out any time soon. But you cannot deny that taking heat out of a hole will make that bit of earth colder. In fact, when we design a geothermal energy system we would calculate its lifetime, that is, how long could we keep extracting heat before it would cool down so much that there would be no point doing it any more. How long that takes depends totally on the geology of the area. New Zealand is very different to Australia in that way. Whether it actually matters that we cool a bit of the Earth, I’m not sure. My guess is that it matters a lot less than the bad effects of global warming that will continue to develop if we continue our use of fossil fuels.
I need to go and do some work now…. but I might come back to this question when I have some more time. Thanks for asking it.
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I don’t know; Heather’s answer however makes a lot of sense!
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Great question and well answered by Heather!
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