The picture above is an image of the Earth without water. We know that the picture above is a very exaggerated one.

About the image
The image shown in the question is very widely claimed to show an image of the Earth without water. A google image search for that image comes up with the nice logo "earth form without water". This image pops up on the internet again and again. This image does not show an Earth without water, even greatly exaggerated.
Note that the image in the question has a fuzzed out title and legend. All of the images on the internet that claim this is an image of the Earth without water have a fuzzed out title and legend. A non-spinning version of that image with the correct title and legend is below. (I do not like reading around animated gifs.)

Source: Bezděk, Aleš, and Josef Sebera. "Matlab script for 3D visualizing geodata on a rotating globe." Computers & Geosciences 56 (2013): 127-130.
The above image is by the author of the image. The title says what the image shows, which is the geoid height. The legend shows that the variation from the highest to lowest geoid height is less than 200 meters. Compare that with the 19.777 km altitude difference between the highest mountain above sea level and the deepest trench below sea level. The image shows the Tibetan plateau as below the reference ellipsoid and shows the Java trench (not visible in the above) as above the reference ellipsoid. This is not a world without oceans.
So what does the image show?
What the image does show is the geoid height, greatly exaggerated. A geoid is the surface of constant gravitational plus centrifugal potential that is the best fit in a least squares sense to mean sea level. In other words, the geoid portrays the Earth's gravitational field. A simpler model of mean sea level is an oblate ellipsoid. The geoid height at some point is the altitude difference between corresponding points on the geoid and on the reference ellipsoid. Red areas in the image (positive geoid height) show where the geoid is above the reference ellipsoid while blue areas (negative geoid height) show where the geoid is below the reference ellipsoid.
Look at the Tibet Plateau in the rotating image. It is blue, which means the geoid there is below the reference ellipsoid. Look at the Java Trench. It is the very deepest red, which means the geoid there is above the reference ellipsoid. The Rocky Mountains are white, no different than the rest of the northern North America. The Alps are reddish, but not as red as is the eastern North Atlantic.
The Tibet Plateau shows up as a depression in this image instead of as a large elevated land mass because it is are very large blob of rock that has less than average density. The rock near the Java Trench is very dense basalt.
The image does not represent anything close to what many say it represents. The image does represent what the author intended it to represent. The image is interesting to those who know what the image portrays. The problem is that the image is so often described incorrectly.
An image of the Earth without water
An image of the Earth without water, slightly exaggerated, is shown below.

Source: : Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman, USGS, Astronomy Picture of the Day 2012 May 15
The Earth is round rather than lumpy. For portrayal purposes, a ball of water about 1365 km across hovers over the western US. That ball represents all of the Earth's surface waters.

Comparison to a basketball
The difference between the Earth's equatorial  and polar radii is about 21.385 km. The difference between the height of the highest mountain on the Earth above sea level and the Earth's deepest trench below sea level is about 19.777 km.
Shrinking these down to the size of a basketball with a circumference of 29.5 inches (I used US units because that is what NBA regulations specify) shrinks the 21.385 km difference between the equatorial and polar radii to a mere 0.4 millimeters, shrinks the height of Mount Everest above sea level to 0.165 millimeters, and shrinks the depth Challenger Deep below sea level to 0.204 millimeters.
A basketball is supposed to be round(ish). That the Earth's polar radius is 99.66% of its equatorial radius makes the Earth fairly "roundish". The roundness of the Earth is in line with the roundness of a billiard ball, and probably for a basketball. (While I did find roundness requirements for a billiard ball, I was unsuccessful in finding roundness requirements for a basketball.)
What about smoothness? Basketballs are not smooth. They are intentionally designed with stipples (pebbles) and channels so as to make basketballs easier to handle. There are patents galore regarding the size, shape, and placement of those pebbles and channels. The pebbles are a bit higher than 0.17 millimeters and the channels are significantly deeper than 0.2 millimeters. The Earth is smoother than a basketball because basketballs are unsmooth by design.


[How deduce from shadows, the angulation of the Sun that the Sun is 15 degrees over horizon?

If you look at the shadow of the tractor on the right side of the exhaust pipe you can see that this picture is taken in the early morning or a fairly short time before sunset.

It is not possible to give you a good estimate of what time the picture is taken as this depends on the time of year.

If the picture is taken in early april it is more than one hour before sunset and more than one hour after sunrise.

If the picture is taken in the middle of may it might be whitin one hour before sunset or one hour after sunrise.


baroclinic current - dimensional analysis

They are missing $g$ in equations 4,5 and 6. When they go from the hydrostatic equation to equation 4, they forget to include gravity in their equations.
All the dimensions except from $g$ and $f$ compensate each other and then $g/f$ produces the right velocity dimensions $m/s$.


Why are thrust faults older than normal faults in the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau?

In line with what strawberry-sunshine has answered, and to put it into more layman terms, after a compressive episode there's a distensive one.
Imagine you have a volume of sand, and you are compressing it horizontally in one direction, it is confined in the other horizontal direction and the only force acting vertically is gravity.
During compression, the sand will reorder itself in response to the applied stress: this reorganization are the equivalent of the thrust faults. You keep applying force until movement is negligible. Then you stop applying it althogether. The weight of the sand will force a second reorganization to adapt to the new conditions. This is the equivalent of a distensive period, and the displacements inside the sand mass are the equivalent of the normal faults developed in the second stage of the orogen.
Although reality is more complicated that that, I hope this example helps you understanding why normal faults can be younger than thrust faults.
Best regards


Are clouds significantly easier to simulate in weather models than climate models?

The answer to this question depends on what process one is interested in simulating well. As you know, short/mid-range weather prediction models and climate models have very different applications and goals.

Because the short range weather prediction model is typically of much higher resolution than climate models (~1-10 km versus ~50-200 km), it is almost always more skilled at simulating clouds forming at a specific location and time. Cloud and rain prediction skill tends to be greater in synoptic scale fronts and near topographic features, and smaller for sporadic, small-scale, tropical thunderstorms. In very high-resolution NWP models (2-3 km or smaller), convection and clouds may be simulated reasonably well without using any cloud parameterization scheme. Nevertheless, clouds and rainfall are still hard to simulate or forecast very accurately.

On the other hand, due to very low grid resolution, climate models can really aim only for correctly simulating the occurrence frequency and the amount of clouds and rain in a larger geographical region over a longer period of time. In climate, clouds play a significant role in radiative feedbacks. Climate models still rely on cloud parameterization schemes.


Is the Earth's hot inner core necessary for life?

Whether the high temperatures of the core is strictly necessary to maintain a habitable temperature at the surface I'm not sure, as the global temperatures are largely controlled by insolation and the greenhouse effect. The black-body radiation temperature of the Earth is about -18 °C, and even a more realistic estimate of the surface temperature without an atmosphere is around 1 °C [1]. That being said, it depends on what you define as life, if the Earth had no atmosphere the temperature would have been lower, but organisms would have adapted to that if they existed in the first place.

As Neo and winwaed also mentioned, the molten iron in the core does protect organisms against harmful radiation from the sun, by providing the Earth with a shielding magnetic field.

Also, the hot core and mantle most likely did influence the origin of life to begin with, as near hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor conditions might have been or are suitable for spontaneous reactions that lead to the formation of self-reproducing molecules [2]. Note this is not in the Darwinian sense Neo talks about (Darwin's book is called On the Origin of Species, not On the Origin of Life), but in the microbiological and geological sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#Temperature_of_Earth
[2] Martin, W., J. Baross, D. Kelley, M.J. Russell (2008) Hydrothermal vents and the origin of life. Nature


How gold deposits can be formed in Himalayas?

Himalayas represent a huge area with a complex geological history which I suspect has large areas that have never been adequately mapped to allow for an ore deposit evaluation. Nevertheless, placer gold might be found within any region of the  Himalayas.

Placer gold deposits are an accumulation of gold formed by gravity separation during sedimentary processes of the gold bearing host rock.

Reference: https://www.britannica.com/science/placer-deposit

Many granite bearing mountains containing quartz-feldspar porphyry dykes/veins associated with elevated concentrations of sulfur and arsenic can be found  in many parts of the world. I would assume these deposits would also found in the Himalayas.

Reference: http://www.minelinks.com/alluvial/goldDeposits.html


Alternative WMS servers for GOES-East satellite imagery

The Real Earth server from SSEC seems to be a good choice.

https://realearth.ssec.wisc.edu/doc/dataaccess.php


How to estimate the runoff time for my area?

The suggestion above to check historical data to get an idea of the time to peak/ time of concentration, and a get sense of the general storm response time is a good one. There are also empirical methods to relate the catchment slope, runoff coefficient, etc. to the time to peak/ time of concentration, which sounds like what you are looking for. You can find examples of them in the MTO Computational Methods webpage, more localized ones might exist wherever you are located. Look for the section on time to peak, although you may need other definitions in there to determine your inputs to that calculation (such as catchment slope).
Keep in mind that 'runoff time' is not a specific term, and that the 'runoff time' for a full response may be extremely long, as nature tends to follow exponential responses trends with long tails in recession. However, the time to peak and time of concentration are more specific terms with definitions you can find and apply.
In terms of how long to run the simulation, depends again based on what you are doing. For a real storm, there may be subsequest rainfall events before the full response is seen. If you just need the peak, then 2-3x the estimated time to peak from the methods above would likely be fine, depending on how flashy the catchment is. If you are running a hydrologic model of sorts, then run it for a long time to see the full response to check the response hydrograph, and compare that to real data to help validate your model.


Can Horizontal Radiation Fluxes Contribute to Net Column Heating?

Yes, there are horizontal radiation fluxes. These can change the heating rate by 10-40 K hr$^{-1}$. They also change depending on the extent of the atmosphere you may be considering. One can also imagine that they are a bit stronger during the sunrise and sunset, when the sun is not directly overhead and the beam has a larger horizontal path length.
There is work, such as the Neighboring Column Approximation which tries to get around that. There's another paper, but I can't find it right now that also tries to resolve this issue.


How much would the Greenland landmass isostatic rebound contribute to long term climate change?

Be warned this is a general (and speculative) answer, but it was getting too long to be a comment: The bulk of Greenland's ice mass is centred over inland/central Greenland. If you were to take all the ice away today, much of central Greenland would actually be below sea level, by several hundred metres in fact:

Glacial isostatic rebound would seek to equilibrate the loss in mass by 'popping' Greenland back up, but it appears that we'd be starting from at or below sea level over much of the island! I'm afraid I don't have any figures to hand over what the total isostatic adjustment might be in the centre, but I would be skeptical of it producing peaks any higher than the current ice sheet level - so the net effect on atmospheric circulation in this region may be small.

Interestingly, the post-glacial isostatic adjustment going on in that region is not as simple as may be expected, some areas over Greenland are actually still sinking, due in part to the movement of former ice mass from the Arctic into the seas around Greenland (as water). The figure below indicates that the areas to watch are actually Canada and Scandinavia, at least for now.

For the existing tall peaks that are rebounding, in general terms you could potentially expect more orographic precipitation enhancement as they became higher, more erosion, which could lead to greater drawdown of CO2 from weathering...the arm-waving speculation goes on... (but see this question.)

From a regional climate aspect, I would perhaps be more concerned over the decrease in albedo on Greenland from the loss of its ice cap. Also, the potential effect of changing surface moisture fluxes to the atmosphere, should central Greenland end up becoming a series of lakes and islands (rather like Finland in its post-glacial state today).


Effect on sea level if the Earth stopped rotating

Let's assume that the earth didn't suddenly stop spinning (because intertia and conservation of angular momentum would do all sorts of "interesting" things that are deserving of a What-If answer), and stipulate that the earth slowed down gradually, or possibly that it was never spinning in the first place (although I'm sure this would have all sorts of other effects that wouldn't have got us to where we are...)

Yes, sea levels would change, but not necessarily for the reasons that you think.

Centrifugal force

Part of the bulge in oceans is due to centrifugal force on the water, but much of it is not. There is an underlying bulge in the seabed as well as the ocean. A result of this (and other variations in the thickness and density of the crust) are that the earth's gravitational field is not even across the globe, and where there is a stronger area of gravitational field, more water is pulled towards it and a bulge results. It is this effect that allows for the bathymetry of oceans to be mapped by satellites that sense the elevation of the sea's surface.

I am no geoscientist, but I imagine that this bulge in the crust at the equator is also to do with centrifugal force - but it would take a lot longer to go away, if indeed it did at all, than one caused just by water.

EDITING to add that there is now an answer elsewhere on this site re the bulge in the crust: How viscous is the Earth's mantle?

Changes in tides & ocean currents

If the planet were not rotating, the dominant period for tidal cycles would likely  be related to a lunar month rather than to a day. There would also be no Coriolis effect, and these two factors would result in major differences to tides and to ocean circulations. As such, it is likely that there would be substantial differences in both short- and long-term elevation changes that are due to currents.

Other effects

I suspect that lack of rotation might have effects on the planet's core and its magnetic field, which might result in all sorts of other impacts... but we'll have to wait for a geoscientist in a speculative mood to talk about things like that :-)


Can we change the temperature in atmosphere?

You are talking about terra-forming on a global scale. To cool the entire atmosphere would result in two separate amounts of energy, one would be the thermal energy removed from the atmosphere, and the other would be the energy expended in the process. Both would be astronomic in magnitude, and orders of magnitude more than all previous components of the anthropic energy balance. How and where would we store such prodigious quantities of energy? Also, it would cost more than the gross economic product of the planet. And would it solve the problem? No, quite the reverse. It would only add to the greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we cooled the planet by 20 degrees, it would only be a matter of time before thermal equilibrium with respect to the atmospheric CO2 and water vapour would be regained. So there would be no long-term gain.

In order to cool the planet significantly we would have to reduce carbon emissions to practically nothing, and then use carbon capture and storage to depress global CO2 from the current 404 ppm to about 320 ppm. If we could do that in time for the next Milankovitch glacial entry point (an orbital feature), then there is a reasonable chance than we could put Earth back into 'glacial mode'. But as time goes by, this gets less and less likely. By the time we double CO2 relative to the pre-industrial era,  another glacial epoch looks highly unlikely. By the time we triple the CO2, we can kiss goodbye to glaciation for ever.


What is the maximum value of Easting in UTM coordinates?

You are correct about the maximum value, you just have the easting and northing backwards.

In your first example, the easting is 414668 m and the northing is 6812844 m. The convention is eastings first. You can think of UTM coordinates as $(x, y)$ pairs, and they are sometimes labelled as such. Here's the conversion offered by one converter:

As you say, eastings are usually less than 834 000 m, and more than 160 000 m.

Note than some UTM zones are non-standard widths. Also, you will sometimes see coordinates referenced to some neighbouring zone, which isn't a good idea but is sometimes convenient, so the numbers can be unexpectedly large. Lastly: be aware that in the US you may sometimes come across UTM coordinates in other units, such as feet. Horrible.


How do we know the rate of decay for radiometric dating is constant?

First of all, you shouldn't take creationists seriously; like flat earthists, their views are totally out of touch with reality. Rates of radioactive decay have been tested many times in the laboratory and found to be accurate. However, there have been some instances where a substantial change of temperature or the formation of a chemical compound involving the radioactive isotope produces a small change in the rate of decay. When used for radiometric dating, this is not a source of error. The main source of error is the minuteness of the samples that labs have to work with. For example, only one potassium atom in 100 is potassium 40,the half life of which is I,300,000,000 years. In argon potassium dating the volcanic tuffs the lab has to analyse contain only a tiny amount of potassium 40,and only 11 percent of that decays to form argon 40 (the remainder forms calcium 40). The lab has to detect and measure the tiny trace of argon which has formed in the sample since it was emitted by a volcano a few million years ago.

Sometimes several dating methods are used on the same fossil or artefact, and if they are in rough agreement the dating is reliable. If you are looking for pin point accuracy, you won't get it with radiometric dating, but if accuracy to within a few percent is good enough, then that is usually achievable. The colossal orders-of-magnitude errors which creationists try to convince you of never happen.


In general, does the presence of vegetation increase/decrease gross water loss (evapotranspiration) compared to barren land (evaporation only)?

I think it is best to introduce some definitions. Often in such studies, two types of evapotranspiration (or evaporation, but I will stick to evapotranspiration during this answer for convenience) are defined: actual and potential evapotranspiration:

Source: presentation called Water resources and their management in Pakistan by Jannat Iftikhar

As you have already stated correctly: when vegetation is present, the surface (generally) holds more water, hence more water is lost to the atmosphere. While barren land experiences more heating and stronger winds, the barren land tends to hold less water to evaporate. Consequently, even though the conditions allow faster and more severe evapotranspiration, there is just no water to evapotranspirate.

The figure below shows an excellent example of this principle for two catchments in Saskatoon. Even though this figure isn't about an area facing desertification, it does exemplify the principle explained above.

Source: An Overview of Temporary Stream Hydrology in Canada (Buttle et al., 2012)

As you can see, the potential evapotranspiration is higher in summer for graph (a), whereas the actual evapotranspiration is higher in graph (b) due to its bigger stock of moisture.

To specify differences with respect to desertification, studies often compare catchments of similar size, meteorological conditions (radiation, precipitation, etc) but with different types of vegetation or different amounts/coverage of vegetation.

For catchments where we have a water surplus, we can check the discharge of that specific catchment and the average precipitation (which produces the discharge when multiplied by the area of the catchment). The difference between the two is the water lost to other processes of which evapotranspiration is the main one.

For the barren land situation, different methods are applied. One could try to calculate the energy balance of the surface based on measured or estimated meteorological and atmospheric parameters. Another option would be to place an evaporation pan, which is basically a flat surface with a layer of water. Subsequently, one can determine how much water is lost from it over a given period of time (taking into account the precipitation).

Sources:

Iftikhar, J.(2017). Evapotranspiration. Water Resources & their Management in Pakistan.

M Buttle, James & Boon, Sarah & Peters, Daniel & Spence, Christa & van Meerveld, Ilja & Whitfield, Paul. (2012). An Overview of Temporary Stream Hydrology in Canada. Canadian Water Resources Journal.


What happens to the higher frequency content of the tremors associated with a volcanic eruption?

It appears that, particularly for volcanos expelling andesitic magmas (those having a higher silica content, among other characteristics), the higher frequencies are more prevalent during the explosive portions of eruptions and tend to be absorbed by the more viscous magma during the tremors.

From the conclusion section of [1]:

  The principal distinction between the basaltic and andesitic cases can be identified in the difference of the magma-gas flux between the basic state and the explosive events. In other words, the high viscosity of the andesitic magmas reduces the permanent degassing, thus producing a low-energy volcanic signal (volcanic tremor) and inhibiting higher vibration modes, whereas the explosions are induced by strong
  emission of magmatic fluids, whose ascent along the conduit
  produces Vulcanian-style eruptions and the excitation of several vibration modes.

Some eruptions, e.g., the 1930 eruption of Stromboli are considered to be Vulcanian and would probably have slightly more energy in the higher frequency bands.

  Reference:

  De Lauro, E., De Martino, S., Falanga, M., Palo, M. (2011) Self-sustained vibrations in volcanic areas extracted by Independent Component Analysis: a review and new results. Nonlin. Processes Geophys., 18, 925–940  [DOI] [PDF] (freely available)


What would the pH of rainwater be if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled?

"Cutting the $CO_2$ in half would yield about 5.9."

(A valid approach because we expect reversibility in chemistry and physics.)

[pH of 5.9 for 200 ppm $CO_2$]

Atmospheric $CO_2$ of 200 would be about that of the last glacial maximum. So most of the difference between pure water at pH 7 and 5.9 would seem to be other gases dissolved in air.

Side note: A drop to much below 200 ppm $CO_2$ would extinguish all life on Earth except those that live at geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, because they do not use $CO_2$.

If a linear relationship is assumed, then if there were 800 ppm of $CO_2$, rain water would have a pH of 5.0.  Though, if we assume the log relationship for concentrations that userLTK mentions in the comments, it would be a pH of 5.3.

Bouttes, N., D. Paillard, D. M. Roche, V. Brovkin, and L. Bopp (2011), Last Glacial Maximum CO2 and δ13C successfully reconciled, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L02705, doi:10.1029/2010GL044499.


The SMAP includes both an active L-band synthetic aperture radar and a passive microwave radiometer.

Any object above a temperature of absolute 0 will emit thermal radiation over a wide range of frequencies.  The spectrum of this radiation can vary from that of a theoretical "black body" depending on its physical properties, especially the dielectric constant.

Since the bulk dielectric constant of the soil depends on the soil moisture, the spectrum of the thermal radiation from the soil is related to the soil moisture.  The dielectric constant of frozen water is different than for liquid water, so there's a different signal depending on whether the soil moisture is liquid water or ice.  Needless to say, it takes a very sensitive and accurate instrument to measure this thermal radiation in order to estimate the soil moisture.

Similarly, for the active radar, the signal reflected from the soil depends on the dielectric constant of the soil, which is directly related to the soil water content.

The data from these instruments are combined to produce a surface soil moisture product- this is an estimate of the moisture in the top 5 cm (2 inches) of the soil.  It's important to understand that this is not an estimate of (and is a very poor substitute for) the root zone soil moisture available to crops or other vegetation.  This distinction is important in identifying drought conditions and in predicting transpiration from plants.

There's a large research literature on using passive radiometers and active radar to estimate surface soil moisture. Is there something more specific about this you'd like to understand?


Concept of artesian aquifers and pressure is not clear.

The red line or piezometric line is the level to which the water wants to rise - if it were allowed to reach hydrostatic equilibrium. Artesian conditions are anywhere where a confined aquifer sits below the hydraulic head level (the level to which the water wants to rise).
In this case the water is confined and cannot reach the water table even though it wants to - this means it is not at hydrostatic equilibrium. This aquifer is described as having a confining pressure or hydrostatic head. If you put a well into anywhere along this confined aquifer, the water will rise out of the aquifer to the level of red line.

I think in your case its a bit confusing as the piezometric line sitting above the whole of the confined aquifer suggests the whole area is artesian but the 'flowing' conditions are only where the piezometric line sits above the actual surface, meaning the water will actually rise above the surface. Another example is that if you were to dig a well, to the left or right of the highlighted area, the water would rise to that level but would still be below the surface so conditions wouldn't be described as 'flowing'.

(http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wsd/plan_protect_sustain/groundwater/flowing_artesian_wells.pdf)


Haean, South Korea: is it of volcanic or meteor impact origin?

A Korean here.
Haean Myeon in Gangwon-do has two theories of creation. One is Meteor impact and another is differential erosion. There were no meteor related evidence found at Haean so the erosion theory is more agreed upon at the moment.

Direct translation from introduction website for Hae An:

  According to the analysis of the granite of the punchbowl basin [nickname for Haean], it consists of 71% feldspar, 22% quartz and 5.7% mica. Feldspar is much more weathering than quartz and mica, and since it is rapidly clayed at room temperature, the lowland is eroded earlier than the current highland with high resistance to weathering, resulting in this unusual branching form.


Is there a formula for heat retained by an atmosphere, based on density and composition?

Earth's atmosphere is composed of a number of layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere, ascending in order from the surface.

Each layer has different characteristics and within each layer the temperature profile is different. The red line in the following US standard atmosphere graph shows the temperature profile of the atmosphere.

The temperature profile is complex and is not related to air density (the amber line on the graph) above the tropopause.

There are higher temperatures on the Earth's surface and at the stratopause but low temperatures at the tropopause and mesopause.

As for carbon dioxide, it is fairly well mixed in the atmosphere, particularly at altitude. Concentrations of carbon dioxide vary laterally near the Earth's surface, with the concentrated regions occurring in areas of major human activity, as can be seen from the NASA produced picture below.


Hydrology - Flowrate vs. radius of influence

I think your confusion is because you are keeping the head fixed. As you increase Q at fixed T the drawdown curve will become steeper when r1, h1, and h2 are fixed. That means r2 will move towards the pumping well.


What is the white coating "patina" we often see on deposited chalcedony/agate?

The white "patina" is most likely some form of opal as you suggest. I did some research and I'll explain how the agate becomes opal and why it's more common in the eroded rock.
Some background:

agate and opal are both forms of silica with the chemical formula SiO2
opal is a hydrated amorphous form of silica (1)

You would find the opal more often on weathered and deposited chalcedony because "the polymerization of silica into three-dimensional gel-like networks [opal] is favored in the pH range 3 to 10 where dissolved salts are present in solution."(2) The pH of stream/river water ranges from 6.5 to 8.5 and all natural water has salts of some kind. (3) Therefore, dissolved silica in stream/river water reacts with the agate and opal grows onto it.

To sum up: yes, the "patina" is most likely opal and it forms when stream/river water interacts with the agate.

sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opal
https://rruff-2.geo.arizona.edu/uploads/CM46_139.pdf
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/fenlewis/Waterquality.html

Source 2 talks about various types of opal formation, but for simplicity's sake I only mentioned polymerization.


Since it discusses the pressure values setup first, then says:

Also provided are the Geopotential and Geometric heights, the
temperature and density of the level based on the 1976 version of the
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Standard Atmosphere...

I would take that to indicate that the vertical coordinates are defined by pressure, which is how I've always believed it to be.  And then the other values are just estimates from the standard atmosphere approximation.
In addition https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds115.4/docs/levels.hybrid.html looks to give more details on the vertical setup...

The vertical coordinate parameters define the edges of the atmospheric
layers in terms of the surface pressure (in Pascals). The parameters
can be considered as being true at the mid-point (in pressure) of a
layer for each point. The formula to use to determine edges of the
layers is $P_{k+1/2} = A_{k+1/2} + B_{k+1/2}P_s$, where $P_s$ is the surface pressure and $A$ and $B$ are defined in the table.

So others who work on modeling may be able to offer further input on the setup, but from my casual understanding, it looks to definitely be based on pressure :-)


Does the diameter of the earth decrease because of soil subsiding due to irrigation and rainfall over the years?

Disclaimer: this is probably TLWR, but you can absolutely apply some physical reasoning to arrive at the answer.

Changes in surface height of the earth are governed by the conservation of mass, i.e. that if mass ($M$) is removed in one location (everglades soil erosion), then an equal amount of mass must be gained at another location (perhaps accretion on the seafloor).The total change in the earths mass is zero $$\Delta M = M_1-M_2=0$$
$$-M_1=M_2$$.

Mass may be broken up into the volume ($V=\Delta x \Delta y \Delta z$) multiplied by density ($\rho$), so $M=\rho V$. In terms of the conservation of mass equation from above, then:
$$-\rho_{1} \Delta x_1 \Delta y_1 \Delta z_1 = \rho_{2} \Delta x_2 \Delta y_2 \Delta z_{2}$$

The place where erosion occurs is described by the left side (with subscript 1). The place where accretion occurs is described by the right side (with subscript 2). This equation says the total mass lost by area 1, must equal the total mass gained by area 2. Now consider the following two situations.

1) The transported sediment does not undergo any change in density. If the density does not change, you have $\rho_1=\rho_2$. Let's also say the eroding area ($\Delta x_1 \Delta y_1$) equals the accreting area ($\Delta x_2 \Delta y_2$) for simplicity. Then all equal terms in the conservation of mass cancel out and you're left with
$$-\Delta z_{1} = \Delta z_{2}$$

2) The transported sediment does undergo a change in density. There's a host of reasons why density can change. If the density changes then we can't let the density terms cancel in the conservation of mass. Lets still say the eroding area and accreting area are equal. The conservation of mass becomes
$$-\rho_1 \Delta z_1 = \rho_2 \Delta z_2$$
or conversely
$$-\Delta z_1=\frac{\rho_2}{\rho_1}\Delta z_2$$
This says that the amount of change in height at location 1 is not equal to the amount of change at location 2 (sure they're proportional, but not definitely not exactly equal).

Putting it all together to answer the question, the average earth radius (r)  is the average of all heights (z) with respect to the center of the earth $$r=\frac{z_1+z_2+...+z_n}{n}$$

Try this all out with arbitrary numbers to convince yourself. Add the changes $\Delta z_1$ to $z_1$, and $\Delta z_2$ to $z_2$
$$r_{before}=\frac{z_1 + z_2 + z_3}{3}$$
$$r_{after}=\frac{(z_1+\Delta z_1)+(z_2+\Delta z_2)+z_3}{3}$$
Rearrange $r_{after}$ to be
$$r_{after}=\frac{z_1+z_2+z_3 + (\Delta z_1+\Delta z_2)}{3}$$

Case 1 If density doesn't change (i.e. $-\Delta z_1=\Delta z_2$), then $$r_{after}=\frac{z_1+z_2+z_3 + (\Delta z_1-\Delta z_1)}{3}$$
The changes cancel out and $r_{before}=r_{after}$. The earths radius does not at all change.

Case 2 If the density changes, $r_{after}$ becomes
$$r_{after}=\frac{z_1+z_2+z_3 + (\Delta z_1-\frac{\rho_2}{\rho_1}\Delta z_1)}{3}$$
and you can see that $r_{after}$ does not equal $r_{before}$.


How strong is the correlation between the dew point of a town and the seawater temperature next to that town?

It depends upon location, latitude, sea surface temperature and seasonality, dominant wind direction (offshore / onshore) and what dew point you are measuring - diurnal mean / min / max, mean weekly / monthly/ annual?

I don't recall anyone ever having asked this question, and I suspect that the answer will be vague and inconclusive. Test a hundred different coastal towns and you will get a hundred different answers. Also, it is time consuming, so do your own research. Numerous databases, which include coastal meteorology sites, will yield dew point data. Sea surface temperatures may not be so easy. I can only speak for Australia where the Bureau of Meteorology has SSTs available on-line. Prepare the two data sets with corresponding dates on an Excel spreadsheet - be careful to maintain exact date correspondence (errors can occur from missing data, systematic errors, transcription errors, and 'February 29th'). Then run the command "=PEARSON" to find the Pearson moment correlation. You could even publish your findings.


Why don't we feed the plastics to the termites?

Many animals can eat through plastic to get to what they really want to eat. Among them: termites, mice and myself when battling against a candy wrapper. However, as far as I understand, none of them can degrade the plastic. You can do the test yourself and I'll guarantee the plastic wrapper will come out the other end of your digestive system.

Nevertheless, several organisms have been identified to be able to actually eat and digest plastics, among them:

Bacteria: Like Ideonella sakaiensis discovered in japan.
Fungi: Like Aspergillus tubingensis discovered in the landfills of Pakistan, or Endophytic Fungi discovered in the Amazon, which seem to be edible, and there are some people offering small mushroom farms you can have at home to turn your polyester and polyurethane trash into food, they call it "FUNGI MUTARIUM".
Insects larvae: Like this plastic-eating waxworm.

That said, it could be possible that some species of termites eat and digest some kinds of plastic. But I don't know of any reports of it. In the comments, Jan Doggen pointed to a 2003 article of people working in that direction. But I guess given the lack of publications afterwards, it probably turned out that the termites were not digesting the plastics usefully. If you search the internet, you will find many references of termites chewing through plastics (like this one).


Urgent, Please help, where can I find worldwide standards of manganese mining?

Your issue is an issue for all types of mining near residential or built up areas, not just manganese mining.
The distance that mines should be from built up areas depends on

the competency of the ground
whether the ground is hard or soft
the type of explosive used - more particularly the energy released by
the explosives used. This influences the blast vibrations produced.
Currently Australian and New Zealand recommendation is a maximum
blast vibration of 10 mm/s in residential areas, preferably less than 2.5 m/s.
the amount of explosives detonated at a time. Many smaller blasts are
usually better than one very large blast.
the presence of geological structures that may preferentially carry
and appear to amplify blast energy

The trouble with laws and standards for such things is they vary between mining jurisdictions. Even within countries, such as the US, Canada and Australia they can vary between states or provinces. Such countries do not have national legislation for the operation of mines. Each state of province is responsible for such laws within its jurisdiction.
In the 1980s, in the State of New South Wales in Australia, to protect lakes and dams from unexpected drainage and also to protect underground coal mines and the people that work in them from water inundation from lakes, dams or other such large stores of surface water a 45 degree angle rule was used.

From the edge of the lake draw a 45 degree line downwards. Where that line intersects the horizontal, or near horizontal, coal seam that defines the closest proximity the mine was allowed to get near the surface lake or dam.

Because of the geometry of a 45 degree triangle both of the shorter sides are the same length. In the case of this rule the distance from the edge of the lake or dam is equal to the depth of mining.
One of the problems with this rule is coal mines in Australia do not use explosives. Coal is mined using cutting machines via longwall mining.
In the City of Ballarat, Australia, gold mining resumed in the 1990s, after the closure of mines during the 1914 to 1918 world war because of a labor shortage. The mine operates underneath the city of 105 000 people.
Under the license to operate, from the State Government of Victoria:

Our licence conditions state that the vibration limit for blasting is 10 mm/sec and that 95% of all blasts must be below 5 mm/sec.

The mine has a self imposed limit of 2.5 mm/s.
Existing underground mine development, in blue, as of July 2020.

Under a proposed expansion to the mine, the newer region will be approximately 50 m below the surface. See the sectional diagram at the end of the webpage. The surface is at elevation RL 1205 and the top of the Nick O' Time Shoot is elevation RL 1150. I suspect this region will under fields or forest.
Generally, for mines under urban environments 100 m is the closest that mines come to the foundations of buildings. This is not primarily due to blasting waves and seismic activity from blasting, but the requirement to maintain a thickness of competent rock beneath buildings to minimize potential for future subsidence.
Factors that are considered in this thickness are:

The strength and competency of the ground below the buildings
The largest size of opening that will be developed underground
Whether the stopes, the chambers from where ore is mined, are
backfilled once the ore has been mined.
If the stopes are backfilled, with what will they be backfilled:
loose waste rock, cemented waste rock, loose sand, cemented sand or
paste fill (larger grained tailings from the processing plant that is
mixed with cement so it resembles toothpaste and is pumped into the
mined stopes).
The degree to which the stopes will be backfilled. Except for the
placement of paste fill, stopes cannot be fully backfilled because of
operational restrictions when other methods are used. There is usually
an air gap of between 2 and 5 m in the top portion of the stope that
cannot be filled.

Backfill prevents the wall of the stopes from collapsing and it minimizes the amount of subsidence that can occur above the stopes.

In your situation, something else to be wary of is exposure to manganese dust from the mine or processing plant. The human body requires small amounts of manganese, but too much can be toxic. Excessive exposure can lead to heath problems with the respiratory tract and/or the brain.

Manganese effects occur mainly in the respiratory tract and in the brains. Symptoms of manganese poisoning are hallucinations, forgetfulness and nerve damage. Manganese can also cause Parkinson, lung embolism and bronchitis. When men are exposed to manganese for a longer period of time they may become impotent.
A syndrome that is caused by manganese has symptoms such as schizophrenia, dullness, weak muscles, headaches and insomnia.

Additional references concerning exposure to excessive amounts of manganese:

National Institutes of Health
Impact of open manganese mines on the health of children dwelling
in the surrounding area
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA)
World Health Organization

Edit 5 September 2020
There is no formula, simple or complex, that will let you calculate how close an active underground mining region can be to buildings on the surface. The reasons for this are:

Geology is complex: different rock types, strength of rock masses
laterally and at depth, geological structures such as
discontinuities, faults and folds.
How the ground propagates blast energy.
The magnitude of the blast energy produced during mining.
Quality of construction of surface buildings: flexibility and
rigidity.

Unlike steel, rock is not uniform in its properties everywhere. Various types of steel are made according to a recipe: some much iron, so much carbon, so much nickel or chromium. Steel is also given different types of treatments when produced, such as hot or cold quenching, forging. All this affects the strength and other properties of various types of steel.
When constantly made to the same recipe each type of steel can be tested to determine its properties. With this knowledge, structural and civil engineering can design a building, or any other structure, anywhere in the world with confidence knowing the steel will always behave the same way. Likewise for mechanical engineers when they design parts for machines.
This cannot be said of geological material, such as rock. Limestone behaves differently to sandstone, which behaves differently to basalt, which behaves differently to komatiite or granite.
Even the same type of rock can behave different in different locations. Discontinuities within rock, oxidation, weathering, the effect of water over prolonged periods of time, the effect of ground stresses can all change how a type of rock will behave in different locations.
Unlike structural and mechanical engineers, mining engineers cannot have the same level of confidence in the properties of the materials (different rock types) they use. With experience they know that a certain type of rock will behave in certain way, but that may not be totally applicable elsewhere.
Because of this, it is not possible to create a formula that can be used everywhere that will state how far an active underground mining region must be from surface buildings.
The other factor which would need to considered is the manner of construction of the buildings near the mine. Buildings that are rigid, made of rock or brick will generally experience more damage, if only just cracked walls, than flexible building made of timber or bamboo.
Flexible buildings can move to certain degree, through swaying,  when subjected to forces such as blasting energy, seismic shocks from natural earthquakes and very strong winds. This movement can absorb some of the disruptive energy and the building remains intact.
Rigid buildings have less opportunity to move when subjected to disruptive forces so they have to absorb more of the disruptive energies and in doing so they are more likely to crack and collapse. This is why buildings in earthquake prone regions (such as Italy), or cyclone/hurricane prone regions (such as northern Australia) are now built according to an earthquake or cyclone/hurricane code where reinforcing steel is utilized to increase flexibility of the building, when completed.
From personnel experience I have seen newer, rigidly made, houses such as the one pictured below,

experience clacked walls and other damage from underground mine blasting where the house was 2.5 km laterally from a mine and the blast was 500 m below the surface. The active mining zone was 1.5 km laterally from the house.
An older, more flexible house, shown below, was only 1 km from the mine and it experienced no damage.


Simple and realistic data for glacier modeling

Testing and model inter-comparison have been an important part of glacier models developments. One of the main numerical modelling suites used by the glaciology community is Elmer Ice, a full-Stokes, finite element, ice sheet/ice flow model. As part of the effort to test models the community around Elmer Ice developed ISMIP-HOM (Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project-Higher-Order ice-sheet Model). ISMIP-HOM consists of five diagnostic and one prognostic experiments, for both 2-D and 3-D geometries. For all the tests, the full-Stokes equations are solved. One of the experiments has an analytical solution obtained from perturbation analysis.

The details of each experiment, including input data can be found at the ISMIP-HOM project page maintained by Frank Pattyn at: http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~fpattyn/ismip/

Some papers that I would recommend looking at to find out more details about the experiments are:

Benchmark experiments for higher-order and full-Stokes ice sheet models (ISMIP–HOM)
The ISMIP-HOM benchmark experiments performed using the Finite-Element code Elmer
Results of the Marine Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project, MISMIP


You have a nice stromatolite fossil.

A stromatolites are layered bio-chemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria. stromatolite fossils can be some of the oldest fossils found on earth. Living stromatolites can still be found today.
 (Wikipedia).

This pattern on the underside of a stromatolite fossil is very characteristic.

Cretaceous age stromatolite fossils from Morocco are commonly found for sale online. (Esty)


Where do I get hourly temperature data for cities with a high resolution?

We used this site in one of the projects I did in a geoscience class. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access The current site lists that there is a problem accessing information, but from what I recall the information can be obtained from any weather station across the globe under your parameters, and is compiled in a Microsoft Xcel spreadsheet that was easy to convert to ArcGIS, so would most likely be compatible in open-sourced ones if that is what you are using. Hope this helps.


Current contaminant levels from Deep Water Horizon oil spill?

Concerning

Is there any good current research out there

the most recent study I found is

Persistence and biodegradation of oil at the ocean floor following Deepwater Horizon

In this work, we assess the extent of degradation over 4 y postspill
for each of 125 petroleum hydrocarbons that contaminated the seafloor.

and compares levels from thousands of sample sites. This seems to qualify 'good current research'.


Quality control in Seismic Acquisition - How much data is required?

After a more elaborate literature survey, it turns out that there are two types of quality control that can be performed on seismic data. One is of the acquisition parameters [1], which are just a few bytes per minute. Meanwhile, in [2], the entire data can be screened through QC software before being sent to a central server. This would help report errors in the acquisition process before conducting further sweeps.


Quickly breeding oysters to combat oceanic pollution?

According to @AllInOne from the comments: This is currently what a project in New York City is trying to do.
Their listed goal on wikipedia is to get one billion live oysters in New York Harbor by 2035.

According to their website, they do this because of the following reasons:

  Oysters have a remarkable ability to filter nitrogen pollution from water as they eat. This is a heroic feat, because excessive nitrogen
  triggers algal blooms that deplete the water of oxygen and create
  “dead zones.”
  “Once all but extinct in New York City’s waters, the whales are undeniably back.” –Popular Science Oysters play a key role in
  attracting life. They earn their nickname as “ecosystem engineers”
  because we see biodiversity levels increase dramatically surrounding
  oyster reefs.
  Oyster reefs can help to protect New York City from storm damage—softening the blow of large waves, reducing flooding, and
  preventing erosion.

the website also carries on to state that 1 million pounds of shells have also been recycled as a result of this initiative.

Other comments suggest that in order to prevent invasive species, one would want to do this with oysters that already exist in the region.


Is oxygen the most abundant element on Earth?

Both of them.

The composition of the atmosphere, crust, mantle, core and bulk earth are all notably different.

The atmosphere is composed of ~78% nitrogen and ~21% oxygen, with small amounts of other gases.

The bulk composition of the earth by weight is mostly, iron, oxygen, silicon and magnesium, in that order, with all the other elements making up only about 5% of the earth's weight. Most of the earth's iron is in the core, which is about 85% iron. The rest of the earth is dominated by oxygen and silicon, primarily in the form of silicate minerals, which consist of $\ce{SiO4^{4-}}$ tetrahedra linked in different ways and with different cations filling in the gaps.


Mathematics and computer science are exact sciences. If something is discovered and known, it is not wrong. With time, there may be better or new ways of doing something, but the old stuff is still correct. This is why you can get a textbook from the 60s and study it. Cauchy's laws are still correct and Euler's theorem is still correct.

This is not the case with earth science (which I expand from your "geophysics"). Just about every paper published in the field of earth science follows the theme of "we thought something but now we found it's actually wrong". And there are hundreds of those per year. While math textbooks teach facts, earth science textbooks present the opinion of the author at the time of writing, which is also commonly the prevailing view in the broader earth science community, but it doesn't have to. In most cases old textbooks are not going to be that bad, but there will be abundant accuracies and omissions. If you go back enough, you might finds that are completely wrong (plate tectonics was only accepted in the 1960s!). But it doesn't have to be this: take subduction zones. The understanding of what happens to slabs once they subduct was only somewhat understood (at least on an undergrad textbook level) in the past 15 years. Whether the slabs themselves melt or not isn't even known today (even though textbooks will mostly say they don't: again, this is the opinion of the author). The inner structure of the earth as understood from seismicity and tomography is being refined every year.

In your textbook links you gave the example of planetary science and volcanism. In the case of planetary science, every time there is a new mission we learn so much. Just example of some discoveries of extraterrestrial volcanoes: Io in 1979, Triton in 1989, and Titan in 2005. Also think of the latest understanding of minor planets, comets and asteroids obtained in the past 5 years. This is not something you will find in even moderately new textbooks.

To sum it up, old earth science textbooks are not completely wrong. But they are wrong to some degree, and they most probably contain a lot of omissions (depends on the exact sub-field). Online sources are usually much better for that. Maybe start with related MOOCs? These can be good starting points. Even if you prefer reading and not watching videos, you can usually find a list of (somewhat) up to date sources there.


How to obtain the correlation between monthly streamflows based on physical concepts?

One suggestion on generating the monthly flows is to use a seasonal ARMA model directly (e.g. see course notes), since you are looking at ARMA model for stochastic generation anyway. That would allow the explicit estimation of seasonal parameters for synthetic generation, and let you skip the step of going annual --> monthly, instead go monthly and calculate annual flows from the monthly series. You may have other reasons for wanting to start with annual flows to verify those first, but that is one suggestion.

In terms of physical concepts at a monthly flow resolution, this is harder to comment on without knowing what physical processes are impacting your streamflows, e.g. snowmelt, river ice and freezing, spring freshet, depression storage, etc. One suggestion may be to check monthly volumes and peaks as well as timing of peaks (such as spring freshet), and ensure that any synthetic time series match these statistics within some acceptable boundary, throwing out any simulations that are deemed unacceptable.

This is a pretty broad (research level) question but hopefully that gives some ideas.


Change in earth mass since the time of the dinosaurs

I gather, but may be wrong, that the mass of earth at present increases by around 108kg/day. All else being equal, one would expect the earth to have gained a mass, since 75 million years ago, of:
$$ 75^6 \times 365 \times 10^8 kg = 6.496 \times 10^{21} kg $$

First off, that should be $75\times10^6$, not $75^6$. That alone makes your estimate high by a factor of 2373. Correcting this error, the mass gain is only $2.7\times10^{18}$ kg, rather than $6.5\times10^{21}$ kg.
Secondly, I've never seen anywhere close to that magnitude of mass gain. The article you cited in a comment gives a range of 5 to 300 metric tons per day. Your value of $10^8$ kilograms per day is 100000 metric tons per day, which is high by at least a factor of 333 (and up to 20000). With this, the mass gain is between $1.5\times10^{14}$ and $8.2\times10^{15}$ kg. This seems big, but it's tiny compared to the mass of the Earth.
Thirdly, you are ignoring atmospheric losses. Almost all of the atmospheric losses are in the form of hydrogen and helium. Most of the lost hydrogen results from water vapor that makes its way from the surface of the Earth into the stratosphere and is dissociated. Most of the lost helium results from radioactive decay in the Earth. Both forms of atmospheric loss represent a decrease in the mass of the Earth. Estimates on this mass loss also vary widely, from 100 to 300 metric tons per day.
Putting these widely varying estimates together means the mass of the Earth is increasing by as much as 200 metric tons per day (+300 mass gain, -100 mass loss), or decreasing by as much as 300 metric tons per day (+5 mass gain, -300 mass loss, and since the numbers vary so widely, that's just -300). Either way, it's small potatoes, even over the course of 75 million years. This means g was between $13\times10^{-9}\,\text{m/s}^2$ smaller than it is now and $9\times10^{-9}\,\text{m/s}^2$ larger than it is now. Both of those numbers are very small.


How does the existence of a Greenhouse Gas Effect (GHE) in the atmosphere affect the tropospheric lapse rate?

For dry adiabatic, you simply ignore the greenhouse gas.   This might sound like a cheat, but it's not.   The dry adiabatic lapse rate doesn't change with temperature or latitude.

For a physical explanation, if you consider what the greenhouse gas does, it captures heat and raises the temperature near the Earth's surface, which expands the troposphere and raises the tropopause.   In other words, the troposphere grows taller, so the lapse rate can remain the same and the tropopause moves a little higher up.   This can also be seen in higher and lower latitudes on Earth in that the tropopause is about 5 miles closer to the Earth at the poles than over the equator.

The adiabatic lapse rate is a property of the ideal gas law.  Heat trapping greenhouse gas doesn't affect it because the gas expands accordingly with trapped heat.

The true environmental lapse rate is a bit more complicated as that fluctuates with humidity.   As the Earth warms, absolute humidity should increase but relative humidity should slightly decrease.   A lower relative humidity, on average, should raise the lapse rate slightly (I think), as the dry adiabatic rate is greater than the moist rate.    But this last paragraph take with a grain of salt.   The environmental lapse rate is more complicated.

  2 identical planets, with 2 identically thick atmospheres, same c,
  same g, same lapse rate but one is a pure CO2 atmosphere and the other
  is a non greenhouse gas with the same c (fictional gas, we will call
  it CO2U)

I'm not an expert in lapse rate, so my answer is a little bit of a cheat, but I'll take the thought experiment as best I can.

Fictional gas - same density as CO2 (at standard temperature & Pressure "STP").   Both atmospheres are on planets of identical surface area, with identical gravity and both atmospheres have identical mass and (just to clarify) Identical density at STP.

The atmosphere that traps heat will expand, so it will have a higher troposphere.   Hot gas expands.   Cold gas contracts.

So the planet without the greenhouse gas will have a troposphere that's 6 miles high, the one with the greenhouse gas and a higher surface temperature will have a troposphere 10 miles high.   The rate of temperature drop can remain consistent at (-g/c) but the hotter planet will have a higher troposphere and a more expanded atmosphere.   That's for the theoretical model anyway.   I don't do real world models.  Those are much harder.

  So the planet with the GHE atmosphere will be hotter at the surface,
  hotter at any given height in the atmosphere and hotter as a complete
  body/system (atmosphere+solid planet). Everything is hotter. Errr...
  what happened to the supposed radiative S-B balance as viewed from
  space then ?? Radiative input from sun the same, radiative output from
  the GHE planet now higher

The energy balance question is a fun one, especially when climate change "skeptics" use it to say "climate change can't possibly be right" - look at the chart they use, more heat leaves the Earth's surface than comes from the sun.

Source.

Lets ignore that debate for brevity and look at the overall theory of increasing greenhouse gas driven climate change.   The Energy from the sun is same, so, why does Earth get warmer?  The answer is trapped heat.   So, what does this look like from space?   Counter intuitively, from space the Earth looks colder than it did 30/40/50 years ago.  It's giving less thermal radiation into space.   This is because heat is being trapped in the lower atmosphere and oceans.  The upper atmosphere on Earth is actually cooling and contracting and less thermal radiation is leaving the Earth, not more, even with the warming surface temperature.  Measuring the decrease in heat that leaves the Earth is one way to measure the total amount of heat being trapped by climate change.

In time, a new equilibrium will eventually be reached and heat in will equal heat out again but for now on Earth, Heat in is greater than heat out.  The difference is heat added, which does things like warm the air, the oceans and melts the ice.   In your scenario, there's no change, it's already warmer, but it's warmer in equilibrium, so heat in = heat out.

In other words:  A warmer atmosphere at equal heights doesn't mean more heat leaves the planet, because the CO2 rich atmosphere makes it harder for the thermal radiation from the warm surface to reach space.   The greater heat is balanced out by a greater percentage being reflected back to the surface.   The amount that goes into space is equal on the 2 planets.


MS in Geosciences With Concentration in Environmental Geosciences Degree Outlook

Is Geoscience similar, or interchangeable with geology?

Geology is, strictly speaking, a subset of the wider field of geosciences. However, this probably doesn't mean much when people look at the name of your degree or the name of the department of school that awarded your degree. As farrenthorpe said in the comments, what's important is what you do in your research.

Common names for degrees (or departments) could be geoscience, geology, earth science (like the place when I am at the moment), earth and marine science, geological and environmental science (like the place where I did my BSc and MSc at). Doesn't matter. You are probably looking for something in the general field of atmospheric sciences, and each of variations above may or may not include it. Find schools that you're interested in and check each case on its own.


Actual thickness of permafrost vs theoretical maximum possibly permafrost thickness

I could not recover my account so here is some additional information for you. This area is Newfoundland and Labrador.  The maximum possible thickness was calculated by that equation I gave up above

Material, Max Possible Thickness, Actual Permafrost Thickness:
granite, 75m, 0m
sandstone, 150m, 1m,
glacial till, 113m,1m
esker gravel, 188m,0m
marine silt, 375m,15m
river sand, 225m, 0m
fen pea,t 300m, 10m


how are the global effects of local environmental disasters?

An excellent example of this would be the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. The specific nature of this eruption features massive amounts of aerosols and ash put into the atmosphere. When Mount Pinatubo erupted, the amount of dust and ash it injected into the atmosphere was responsible for a worldwide reduction in temperature of 0.5–0.6 °C in the northern hemisphere over the next year, as well as a massive increase in ozone depletion.


What produces these distinct shapes in the Rub' al Khali seen from space?

This a great example of "self-organization" in a geomorphological system; this one an oscillating system at a fairly large scale. On a much smaller scale, you find similar structures on sand dune surfaces themselves as well as dry dusty dirt roads:

Self organization (and its scaling) is a complex process delicately dependent on just a few variables, in the case of desert dunes, wind carrying capacity, and critically, bed surface. (You can also find examples of oscillating chemical self organization in rocks when, for example, you see "tree-rings" around plagioclase crystals in anorthosites.)

The hidden (and surprising) complexity of self organization in natural systems is reflected in the difficulty in modelling these behaviors. In the case of small sand dunes:

  ...a complex process of ripple coalescence is responsible for this evolution of the ripple field. Small, fast-moving ripples catch up with and are absorbed by larger, slower forms, each such merger resulting in a growth of the mean wavelength and a decline in the relative dispersion of the wavelengths.

This mechanism may figure in modelling the formation of large dune fields:

  Because dunes reorient only at their crest terminations with a change in wind regime, the rate of formation of a new pattern of small dunes is typically faster than the rate of reorientation of the existing pattern, resulting in the superposition of simple patterns to give rise to complex patterns. Complex patterns are distinct from spatial changes in a simple pattern, and from the type of superposition that characterizes compound/complex dunes.

There are literally tons of examples of self organization in earth systems, at all kinds of scales, but that NASA image is a stunner!


What was there before the Paleolithic and where really did life start for us humans, not like homo?

The partition in stone - bronze - iron is an early 19th century thing invented to explain to pupils the findings in north-western Europe. It has little modern day relevance.

Paleolithic (European ! Africa has a different chronology and the below is not generally applicable !) is a hand wavy container expression for anything from the first signs of human presence in Europe ~1.7my up to and including the last glacial maximum (lgm), and mostly refers to the life and strife of humans in the cold steppe. It encompasses different human species and subspecies, and in itself is divided into lower-, middel- (starting ~250,000) and upper paleolithic (~45,000) following stratigraphic expressions that what is above is regarded as being younger than what is below.

On a high level, lower paleolithic (again: Europe !) is generally connected with the presence of Homo habilis and erectus and ante-neandertals (i am being a "lumper" here), the middle paleolithic is the time of the Neandertals (Homo sapiens neandertalensis), and the upper paleolithic deals with the likes of us, Homo sapiens sapiens. All these units have further subdivisions based on tool technology and -industry. As an example, the upper paleolithic is further subdivided in (old to young) Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean (around the lgm) and Magdalenian with their respective clearly distintctive stone and bone tool industries, and these have further local or regional expressions that deserve more detailed description.

With the onset of re-forestation human subsistance changes funtamentally. This is the time of the hunters and gatherers of the forests, the Mesolithic period in Europe, a relatively short period broadly taking place between ~9000 and 5500 BC. It lasts until and partly side by side with the incoming Neolitihic, the revolutionary (but not abrupt) change to farming, animal husbandry and settledness. The latter started over a few thousand years in Anatolia/Fertile Crescent/Levant between 11000 and 8000 BC (simplifying here for the sake of brevity).

Then it gets complicated. Metal (copper) has already been in use since in the Neolithic (see Chalcolithic), use of bronze starts in the middle east ~3200BC, and spreads north, arriving in central Europe around 2200BC. But it is not used everywhere (example: Egypt). Use of iron starts ~1200BC, arriving in central Europe ~800BC.

Please keep in mind that there are huge regional or local differences with their respective own chronologies, because human subsistance and so the use of tools has never been uniform.

Regarding humans: We can speak of "humans" and the genus Homo with the onset of tool making ~2.6My ago, Oldovan stone tool technology in East Africa, though in these times there is not always and generally a link between a human species and a certain stone tool industry. The case of human speciation is complicated, and got even more so with the use (ancient) genetics as a tool for analysis. Though the latter is still a developin science, it looks like there have always been multiple species or subspecies around until recently. Today there is only one human species remaining on earth, and it is unclear how long they'll make it.

Pls. let me suggest to search the Biology departement here (or elsewhere) for an up-to-data primer on human species and subspecies.

Ok, questions ? :-)

Edit: since the original question has been clarified, i'd like to add something. First, there is no such thing as a single step that defines what an anatomically modern human (amh) really is. Evolution does not jump ! It is a gradual process of speciation, of adaptation to a niche. It may take place in a limited geographical region if individuals don't move far or over a large aerea, even over continetal limits if individuals or groups move in an out. As that's what humans did, things aren't exactly simple and in constant flow.

Find places of early amhs show that they developed, just like other humans before, in Afrcia, but rather distributed than in a single spot. Jebel Irhoud is up to now the oldest specimen with traits of amh, for the splitters among us in the field between h. heidelbergensis, rhodesiensis, neandertalensis, sapiens ...

But there is maybe another thing to your question, which is called "behavioural modernity". People using personal adornement, creating art objects like figurines, paintings of scenes from real life or more abstract symbols on cave walls, carving and painting mussels, etc. For a long time this was attributed to amh in Europe alone, starting with the arrival of the first groups of modern humans ~45,000 years ago. But recently, this was questioned, with the findings of traces from Neandertal find sites hinting to abstract thinking much earlier, 65,000BC in Gibraltar (Gorham Cave) and 115,000 in southern Spain. So, from a cultural point of view, there is no real "unique feature" in favour of amh any more, the differences are floating, not "carved in stone" (haha).

This is all in flow and debated. There'll surely be more news on all this soon (tm).


What are the guidelines for constructing variable names that follow CF conventions?

Possible this is not what you need, but here's an archive of the Guidelines for Construction of CF Standard Names, which is "Version 1, 3 December 2008" and was cached on July 28, 2013; guessing that the page has not been updated since December 2008.

Also, the source code repository for CF Conventions website you linked to (cf-convention.github.io) is viewable from here; if you had questions about the status of the site, you might try contacting the developer listed on Github for the project; their email is listed on their Github profile.

UPDATE: Here's the contact info for the CEDA Data Scientist; their "main role in CEDA is the development of metadata standards, particularly the CF (Climate and Forecast) metadata conventions."


No, that will not happen. There is just too much oxygen in the atmosphere.

Over 20% of our atmosphere is oxygen.
Only about 0.04 % of our atmosphere is CO2, so too much CO2 would kill us much sooner than the lack of oxygen.

If you reduced the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere from 20.8% to 19.8%, you wouldn't even feel the difference. If you reduced it to 15 %, you would still survive it. You could even survive 10 % for short time periods.

However, let's see what would happen if you added CO2 as a replacement for the oxygen you removed: at 1%, you would feel extreme dizziness. At 5% you would lose consciousness and die.

But the real danger in CO2 lies elsewhere. Even an increase from our current 0.040 % to 0.045 % could cause a lot of damage to the climate, and an increase above 0.055 % could be disastrous. Unless you are locked in a small room, the reason why the increase of CO2 and decrease of oxygen will be dangerous won't be because you wouldn't be able to breathe. Changes significantly smaller than those required to make breathing difficult, would be enough to wreck the ecosystem, cause drought, desertification, starvation, and economic collapse.

Also note, that trees are very important for the water cycle, as a habitat for many species, and for preventing soil erosion, but they play an insignificant role in producing oxygen. Most of our oxygen is produced by algae.


Does the Earth produces measurable gravity waves?

Edit: This answer refers to the first version of this question which asked about "gravitational waves".
Typically, the term "gravitational wave" is reserved for distortions ("strain") in spacetime, in accordance with General Relativity. Gravitational waves are a property of spacetime and can thus propagate in empty space. In contrast, what you measure here are simply seismic waves, such as pressure waves propagating through Earth and your setup. In fact, seismic waves are the limiting noise that prevents gravitational wave detectors such as aLIGO to measure at lower frequencies, see e.g. this paper for a discussion and plots.


Possible and probable source of Curiosity Rover's $\small\sf{CH_4}$ detection on Mars

The possible source of methane is biological, and that is what everyone is hoping for, but the more likely source is geological, produced by chemical reactions between rock and water deep underground and issuing though fissures to the surface. We are dealing with very small amounts here which are difficult to detect and measure with precision. Once out in the open, they are dispersed by breezes and decomposed by sunlight, so that could explain why they come and go. It has been suggested that methane abundance varies with the seasons, but I can't see any mechanism for that, apart from clathrates. Clathrates are a sort of ice composed of water and methane, and are abundant on Earth in the ocean and in Arctic tundra. When heated, clathrates decompose and release methane. Another suggestion is that the Curiosity rover is incontinently leaking methane wherever it goes and contaminating the samples it analyses, but I cant see any explanation for that either. I think methane has been detected on Mars, but we will have to keep an open mind on the source until more data has been gathered. My own opinion is that there has never been life on Mars, but I agree that we can't rule out the possibility that 4 billion years ago conditions were sufficiently Earth-like that Mars evolved its own primeval soup and life got started in the same way as it did on Earth, but has since been eradicated or driven underground.


Using current technology, is it possible to directly measure magma flow in the mantle?

There are many issues I have with your suggestion. How would you distinguish the radiation that your source would emit from other sources of radiation? Also how would you detect the radiation? Where would you place the radiation detector? A detector placed on the surface of the Earth would not detect any radiation from the Mantle because the Crust would absorb the radiation, due to its thickness.

Any device that would be placed in a pool of magma would most likely be melted by the heat of the magma. If the shell of the device managed to survive, the electronics and sensors would be damaged to the point of being inoperable.

If a device were to survive the heat how would the device send signals to the surface of the Earth? Extreme ultra low frequency radio might work, but the source signal would need to be very strong and I don't envisage that being possible for a device dropped into a volcano.

Getting a device to sink into magma would require the device to have a density higher than that of the magma.

Drilling very deep holes to conduct a seismological survey of mantle magma is not possible given that the deepest hole ever drilled was the Kola Superdeep Borehole, drilled by the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Its final depth was 12 262 metres - one-third of the way through the Baltic continental crust. Drilling was terminated short of the 15 000 metre target due to the rock temperature being 180 degrees Celsius.

Using electric potential variations within magma to study magma within the mantle would not be possible because the technique requires an antenna to be place in a drilled hole.


What level of heat creates a dust devil?

When a parcel of dry air with a given initial temperature rises, it cools at a specific rate - the dry adiabatic lapse rate. If the surrounding environment cools at a slower rate with height than the parcel, the parcel will eventually be colder than the environment and sink. On the other hand, if the environment cools faster than the parcel does, the parcel remains warmer than the environment and rises freely.

So for a parcel of dry air to continue to rise, the environmental lapse rate needs to be greater than the dry adiabatic lapse rate. Surface heating does a really efficient job of increasing low-level environmental lapse rates, which is why dust devils are more common when there's more sun.

I'm not a scientist, so I can't tell you an exact number, but the dry adiabatic lapse rate is 9.8 degrees Celsius per kilometer, or 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit per 1,000 ft. So if the environment cools at over 1 degree C per 100 meters, it will likely be conducive to dust devils.


Other ways that animals can affect soils is by burrowing, overturning soil through digging or ploughing and also through shallow diggings/scrapings.

Burrows create voids/chambers in soils that can allow air to react with soil beneath the land surface. Likewise they provide easier pathways for water to penetrate soil and affect changes that way.

Overturning soil whether its due to animals looking for food or human agriculture buries soil that was on the surface and brings deeper soil to the surface. It also aerates the top portion of the soil and it allows for easier penetration by water and it provides a greater surface area of soil to be exposed to the air in the atmosphere.

Shallow digging or scrapings by animals, particularly in very hard capped soils can create broken patches that allow water to penetrate a hard impervious cap and allow the water to penetrate deeper in the soil than it would otherwise.

Also, once soil has been overturned and aerated, whether by animals or humans, wind can blow away parts of the soil.


No, teeth are not used to determine hardness. That would be incredibly stupid. What teeth are used for is distinguishing silt from clay.

When dealing with very fine grained rocks you might be interested in the relative proportions of clay-sized particles and silt-sized particles in the rock. This is very hard to do, but surprisingly quite easy when you try to put some between your teeth. Clays will have a smooth, paste-like, feeling, whereas silt will feel like fine grained sand. With enough experience you will be able to give a rough estimate of the proportions of the minerals.

Also notice this related question:

When can taste be used to help identify rocks?


Why wouldn't the earth be "always daytime" if the "daily cycle of sunlight" was drawn full-scale?

The sun is really far away. Thus its rays are essentially parallel at the earth's orbit. So, while the diagram you posted is clearly a bit off in terms of the relative size and distance between the sun and the earth, the parallel rays are about right.


Ways, Through Science, to Counteract Hurricane Forces?

It might be possible but hasn't been done in practice
One idea is that smoke could be introduced into the hurricane and, because the smoke is heavier than air, the wind speeds could be reduced.
The smoke would also cause water vapour to condense at lower altitudes and hamper the heat cycle within a hurricane. When the water evaporates it carries with it the energy needed to heat it to that point. The water vapour is lighter than air and will rise but once it condenses it falls - releasing the energy it gained from rising (like if you pushed a ball up a hill), this energy adds to the air currents within the hurricane. If the water condenses at a lower altitude it doesn't have as much energy.
There are other ideas such as using fans to blow in cool air and seeding clouds with silver iodide (link makes for an interesting read but ultimately failed), these ideas may also have some potential but one of the problems with altering complex weather systems is that the side effects are not necessarily well understood. This makes carrying out practical tests difficult on both a moral and legal level.


Earthquakes in Oklahoma influenced by Humans?

The sudden and recent occurrence of multiple earthquakes in Oklahoma is due to a widespread redistribution of stresses within the ground, particularly at depth.

Installing large pipes underground for storm water, waste water, or potable water or even digging a basement under every house in an entire city will only cause a very minor localized redistribution of ground stresses, near the Earth's surface. Such minor redistributions of stresses will not lead to earthquakes.

As Blaydes states, injection of fluids and fracking will induce additional stresses and they can also lead to faults and ground fissures becoming lubricated and thus prone to movement, resulting in earthquakes.

Removal of a liquid from an underground reservoir, oil or water, can have an adverse impact. If the reservoir is naturally pressurized, tapping the reservoir will reduce its pressure and the affect that has on the surrounding rock.

Depending on the circumstances, releasing pressure can unlock rock, allowing it to move. It's a bit like having a number of blocks of lumber clamped together by a vice a or a clamp. Provide enough stress (clamping force) and everything is held together nicely. Too much stress and the blocks become damaged due to the strength properties of the individual blocks. Not enough stress and the blocks become free to move relative to one another.

It is well documented, particularly in the US, that removal of water and oil from underground reservoirs can cause surface subsidence. In the case of the Lost Hills and Belridge oil fields in California, subsidence rates of up to 40 mm/day (greater than 400 mm per year) were measured. In the Wilmington oilfield at Long Beach, California, an area 50 square kilometres subsided. In the centre of the subsidence area the maximum subsidence was 9 meters.

The removal of liquids from underground reservoirs results in a reduction of fluid pressure which causes the pore spaces to close and the sediments to compact, resulting in subsidence. As the sediments compact the rock above it also subsides. Under certain circumstances, such ground movements can induce earthquakes.

In Oklahoma's situation, oil pumping, fracking and fluid injection into oil wells are very likely candidates for the causes of earthquakes experienced there.


Can large earthquakes happen few times at same place(in days)

Yes, and they are quite common, they are called aftershocks.

An earthquake redistributes the stress that creates the quake across the fault line, which then creates new points of stress, which result in additional earthquakes, which further redistribute the stress again, and so on and so forth until all the energy is spent.

Earthquake swarms also exist.  They basically work on the same principle as aftershocks but are much stronger. They tend to occur in places where you have many faults in the same region.  The release of pressure on one fault causes movement that puts more stress on other faults, causing a cascade of quakes. California and other transform faults are famous for them. Here is rather nice BBC film about them.  http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2262rz_bbc-horizon-2003-earthquake-storms_shortfilms.


What causes the earth to be a good grounding system?

The electricity you're talking about is the man-made kind, which is completely independent of any charge the Earth has relative to its atmosphere. Man-made power sources are almost all referenced to the Earth as zero volts, as established by connecting the "ground" to a conductive rod driven into the ground. Each house's electrical system is also grounded in this way. Since earth (lower-case "e") is at least somewhat conductive (except for perhaps dry sand), if you grab a conductor while standing barefoot on the ground then current will flow through you, through the ground, and then back to the source of electricity and/or your house's local grounding rod. Enough volts, and good enough conduction, and you get hurt or killed. Rubber shoes, rubber gloves, and just plain common sense can prevent this.

Again, this has nothing to do with the charge the Earth has relative to its atmosphere, as man-made power is generated referenced to Earth ground; plus, since it's almost always alternating current, the polarity changes 50 to 60 times a second, so any purported existing voltage wouldn't protect you.


Dynamic cone penetrometer (DCP) results and correlation

The underlying principle of the DCP is that the rate of penetration of the cone, when driven by a standard force, is inversely related to the strength of the material as measured by, for example, the California Bearing Ratio (CBR) test. Where the pavement layers have different strengths, the boundaries between the layers can be identified and the thickness of the layers determined. A typical result is shown.

It is recommended that a reading should be taken at increments of penetration of about 10 mm. However, it is usually easier to take readings after a set number of blows. it is therefore necessary to change the number of blows between readings according to the strength of the layer being penetrated. For good quality granular subbases readings every 5 or 10 blows are normally satisfactory but for weaker sub-base layers and subgrade readings every 1 or 2 blows may be appropriate. Little difficulty is normally experienced with the penetration of most types of granular of weakly stabilised materials. It is more difficult to penetrate strongly stabilised layers, granular materials with large particles and very dense, high quality crushed stone.
The instrument has been designed for strong materials and therefore the operator should persevere with the test. Penetration rates as low as 0.5 mm/blow are acceptable but if there is no measurable penetration after 20 consecutive blows it can be assumed that the DCP will not penetrate the material. Under these circumstances a hole can be drilled through the layer using either an electric or pneumatic drill or by coring. The lower layers of the pavement can then be tested in the normal way.


What is the difference between Saprolite and Regolith?

In short, saprolite does make up the regolith. Saprolite is a term for in place, weathered rock. Regolith encompasses all the heterogeneous components of loose material covering the solid rock of the earth or other planetary bodies.


Why does the color of this hillside rock vary?

It's pretty hard to say anything about this kind of weathering without actually being there and having a closer look.

Usually, the simplest explanation for reddish or brownish colours in otherwise grey rocks is the presence of iron oxides. You can see that the brown area is on a fault or joint face. This leads me to think that maybe this was a conduit for groundwater that oxidised the rock. When the road cut (or whatever it is) was made, this part was exposed. Notice that you have some brown elsewhere - it could be that those are faults or joints cut perpendicular to the face, so that's why you only see a brown streak instead of a surface.


How does a tsunami affect biology and other matter in its path while in deep water

The answer to your question, based on linear theory, is no. The short answer is that the slope of these waves is very small, and the displacement of the particle paths is proportional to (ak) (times, perhaps, a depth dependent term) with a the wave amplitude and k its wavenumber. Now let's make this answer rigorous.

Recall, for irrotational inviscid 2 dimensional water waves the governing equation is

$$\nabla^2 \phi = 0$$

where $\nabla^2 \equiv \partial_{xx}+\partial_{zz}$ and $\phi$ is the velocity potential. We require particles on the free surface to remain there, and for the pressure to be continuous across the air-water interface, which gives us (assuming the atmospheric pressure to be 0) our surface boundary conditions

$$\left.\eta_t+\phi_x\eta_x = \phi_z\right|_{z=\eta}; \quad \quad \left. \phi_t+\frac{1}{2}(\nabla \phi)^2 +gz=0\right|_{z=\eta},$$

where $\eta(x,t)$ is the free surface displacement. Finally, we require the bottom to be impermeable, hence

$$\phi_z = 0 \quad @ z= -h$$

for $h$ the depth of the water. These are a closed set of equations. Note, the governing equation, ie Laplace's equation, is linear and hence simple to solve. However, the free surface conditions are nonlinear, and more significantly, evaluated at a moving interface. This last condition makes these equations very difficult to solve.

Therefore, to make progress, we generally take asymptotic expansions of these equations. Here, we'll just linearize the equations about some small parameter $\epsilon = ak$ for characteristic wave amplitude $a$ and wavenumber $k$. We will also consider periodic monochromatic waves, so that one can show that the following $\eta,\phi$ satisfy the governing equations to first order in $\epsilon$:

$$\eta = a \cos \theta; \quad \phi = a\omega \sin \theta \frac{\sinh k(z+h)}{\sinh kh},$$

where $\omega$ is the angular frequency given by the dispersion relationship

$$\omega = \sqrt{gk \tanh kh},$$
and $\theta\equiv kx-\omega t$.

To answer your question, we would like to know the behavior of a particle with position $(\xi+x_o,\zeta+z_o)$ originally located at some position $(x_o,z_o)$.This is the Lagrangian description of the fluid. Recall, we can relate the Eulerian and Lagrangian descriptions of a fluid through the velocity field, that is

$$\phi_x = \frac{d \xi}{d t}; \quad \phi_z = \frac{d\zeta}{dt}.$$

Substituting in the relations for $\phi$ found above, and then integrating in time, we find

$$\xi =-a\frac{\cosh k(z_o+h)}{\sinh kh} \sin \theta_o; \quad \quad \zeta = a\frac{\sinh k(z_o+h)}{\sinh kh} \cos \theta_o,$$
where $\theta_o =kx_o - \omega t$. We note that the particle displacements from the origin scales with the wave amplitude $a$.

Now, we can eliminate $\theta_o$ by squaring the expressions for the particle position to find

$$\frac{\xi^2}{\left(a\frac{\cosh k(z_o+h)}{\sinh kh} \right)^2 } +\frac{\zeta^2}{\left(a\frac{\sinh k(z_o+h)}{\sinh kh} \right)^2 }= 1$$

which describes an ellipse. I've attached a figure from Kundu and Cohen which illustrates this.

Now we can finally talk about some physics, and answer your question. For deep water waves, when $kh \ll 1$, the above relation reduces to the equation for a circle, hence the particles have a circular orbit which decays with depth (with an e-folding scale that goes like the wave number). For shallow water waves, i.e.  $kh$ small, our equation describes an ellipse with a semi major axis that is much much larger than the semi minor axis, hence there's is nearly horizontal motion that doesn't decay much with depth.

Tsunamis have wavenumbers that are large enough so that even in the middle of the ocean they fall into the shallow water regime, meaning that the particle trajectories are approximately very flat ellipses, or horizontal lines, and this does not decay with depth. However, their deviations from their origin will be very small, as their slope $ak$ is very very small, e.g. $\mathcal{O}(1^{-5})$ for numbers I looked up online. Therefore, it's very unlikely that this will have much of an effect on a passive tracer.

Now, the story is very different as the wave approaches shore and steepens. But this is a different story for a different day.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask any other questions,

Nick


What are we seeing when we see the curvature of Earth?

the horizon is a circle centered at the viewer's position

There are two things wrong with this. The first is the assumption that the Earth is entirely spherical - there are no hills, mountains or other bulges to block the view. But let's make that assumption, because there's a more fundemental misunderstanding in the geometry.

The horizon is a circle that is centered horizontally at your position, but not vertically, because by being above the surface you can see a little way around the curve of the planet.

If you're standing on the ground you are only looking from a couple of metres altitude, so you can't see very far around - this means that the circle of the horizon is centered only a small distance below your feet. Note that from this height you can't make out any curvature in the horizon.

If you're standing at the altitude from which your picture was taken, the horizon circle is centered some depth into the planet. So you are not looking out across a circle, as you imagine - you are looking down, onto a circle. Or if you like, you're looking down onto a disc that happens to have some portion of the planet piled on top of it. And when you look at a circle (or a disc) from above, it appears curved.


Yes. In fact, there are sand-dunes in Antarctica [1:15].


Most notably, a moving Lithosphere. Shaving off the surface 20km (Lithosphere is~120km) would not stop plate tectonics. What makes Earth's surface so different is that it has a constant cycling of lithosphere; Dead planets are forced to keep surface scars caused by major impacts and weathering. To this date, we have not found another example of plate tectonics, though our ability to confirm this on other planetary bodies is limited.


Why would there be no hydrocarbons in the Sveconorwegian belt?

There's a little more to it than its substantial age, but not a lot.

First, a bit of background. We need a few conditions for accumulations of oil or gas:

A kerogen-rich source rock that has been 'cooked' to thermal maturity. Insufficient temperature, or insufficient time, and it's undercooked; if the temperature is too high, or the rock is very old, then the volatiles have all been discharged or cracked. I don't know of any source rocks older than about Ordovician; the best ones are Jurassic in age.
A migration pathway from the source to a trapping configuration, and time for this to have happened.
A structural or stratigraphic trap, such as an anticline, and the geological conditions that have preserved it since filling.
A reservoir rock — a porous and permeable rock. Usually this is a sedimentary rock, though hydrocarbons have been discovered in fractured granites (in Vietnam for example; this is rare).

Only 'conventional' hydrocarbon deposits need all these conditions (sometimes called a 'petroleum system', such as you might find in the North Sea). 'Shale gas' is basically just a mature source rock — we can extract hydrocarbons from it by fracking, for example.

As you might guess from the list of conditions, there are lots of things that can destroy a hydrocarbon accumulation, or preclude its formation. For example, deep burial destroys porosity by diagenesis and compaction. Time increases the likelihood of trap leakage or thermal destruction of volatiles.

So, why no hydrocarbons in the (mostly Precambrian) Swedish-Norwegian shield? Maybe these are the top 3 reasons:

These old rocks never had a good source rock: too old, too little life. A bad start.
They are so old that any source would have been mature hundreds of millions of years ago.
In any case, metamorphosis has destroyed any potential reservoirs, and a combination of tectonism, orogenesis, and exhumation has destroyed any traps.


What's the geological period of the birth of the river Ganges?

From How Old is Our Ganga, the Ganges "formed as a consequence of the India-Asia collision around 55 million years ago resulting in the formation of the Himalaya. This provided a large continental mass which together with large rainfall in the catchment area and long term erosion generated /enlarged the river valleys".


Do river fluxes help contribute to long-term carbon sequestration?

Rivers generally include dissolved oxygen. Therefore any organic content in suspension will tend to dissolve. The movement of water (open to the atmosphere, etc) will tend to entrain some oxygen from the atmosphere.

For carbon to be preserved in sediment, it has to be buried before it can break down. Typically this would occur where water movement is minimal so that it can precipitate out and be buried by mud/sand.

Areas of water may be anoxic (eg. ocean bottom waters, or the sea bottom waters that led to the deposition of the English Kimmeridge Clay), but these areas tend to have restricted currents so that what oxygen that is available is "quickly used up" oxidising some of the organic material.

Yes you can capture carbon in sediments - that is how all fossil fuels are formed, but you have to have the right conditions. Lakes, swamps, seas are much better than running rivers themselves. A deltaic swamp with lots of organic stuff growing in situ but experiencing periodic river floods could be a good way to preserve organic material...  (cf. the Carboniferous in Europe and the US).

Further references:

Factors influencing organic carbon preservation in marine sediments.

"Sedimentary organic matter preservation: an assessment and speculative synthesis" in Marine Chemistry Volume 49, Issues 2–3, April 1995, Pages 81–115

Interesting research on the influence of iron's oxidation states on the oxidation of organic matter:  Preservation of organic matter in sediments promoted by iron, Lalonde et al,  Nature v483, pp198–200