- does it have any impact on, you know, the farms you're putting it on?
These two questions probably already have an answer: we already grow plants, vegetables, fruit trees on basaltic soils (soils formed by the erosion of basaltic rocks). Some European countries have almost only them, like Iceland, Albania, Montenegro. Usually the crops are excellent, and benefits directly from this natural fertilizer e.g. some Italian wines. These rocks also help to capture water in arid regions, btw.
We are also plenty of real world experiments of adding these substances to other ecosystems: every basaltic volcanic eruption distribute a dust cloud around the vent, usually in an area of hundreds km^2, influencing the environment.
All the oceanic crust is made of basalt, so approximately 2/3 of the planet is covered by several miles of it. Unfortunately mining oceanic crust is impractical, for obvious reasons. However some oceanic crust got trapped between mountain ranges during continental collision, forming ophiolites. These can be suitable mining sites, together with LIPs (large igneous provinces) and the rocks of some shoshonitic (K-rich) basalt volcanoes.
Probably in many places along the Alpine Himalayan mountain range, including Algerie, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, among others. These mountainous areas are usually heavily fractured by faults and the resulting rock blocks have been used for millennia to build walls. It's rather hard to say if rock availability is the only reason that drove people to build in a given place: usually major faults zones are eroded by rivers and form valleys. this places are preferable building sites because of water availability, easiness of transportation along the river, etc. (sorry for my English)
you probably do not understand what I've wrote but it's fine, it's your right. I'm not replying to you anymore, I wrote the people that paid my education in order to study palaeoclimatology and give a educated opinion in their place when necessary. They can hopefully read my messages with a more open mind. I tried to make them constructive and informative, and I'm open to constructive questions.
I understand that you are correcting some assertions, but the way you did questioned the scientific competence of other contributors is reducing the value of the entire sentence you were replying to. You are throwing out the baby with the bath water. The key message I wanted to stress, with additional contributions to the discussion, is that we have to be concerned. If you agree with me on this I'm fine. Unfortunately however your corrections suffered the same problem of the ones you were correcting. In particular I do not agree with you on these two sentences: "Climate change is not predicted to exterminate humans." It is. It's not predicted to make Homo sapiens sapiens extinct, like you probably meant, but many humans can be exterminated by repentine climate changes (think to famine, wars, drought). "This melting cycle was happening before the industrial revolution and was not created by humans." Human-made contributions are perturbing the cyclicity, to an extent that can lead to a non-cyclical patterns.
I'm replying exactly to your assertion "Do your homework before repeating random exaggerated claims you've heard on the internet". I did, I didn't get my qualifications searching on Wikipedia, did you? "This melting cycle was happening before the industrial revolution and was not created by humans.": the cycle existed before humans, I agree, but the velocity of temperature change has increased after humans started to burn fossil fuels and deforestate.We are increasing the rate of change.
temperature is not a concern, Life can exists in a relative large range of temperatures. The problem is the speed of temperature rise, that is incompatible with the speed some species can migrate from now-hostile areas. Dinosaurs didn't died because the asteroid hit their
head, but because of the abrupt climate change triggered by it. The key word is "abrupt" not "change".
I'm a geologist and I've focused on palaeoclimatology putting an eye on the rate of climate change. I've wrote several articles on international peer-reviewed journals. I can say, basing on 20+years of study and lab/field work, that what is happening is really concerning because human emissions are summing up to natural Milankovitch cycles, altering the rate of climate change with unpredictable (since they are unprecedented) implications for food chain supply and society.
It's not that simple. The graphs you are pointing at do not include the last century, and even if - they are tracing temperature by a proxy: bentic foraminifers dO16/O18. They are organisms living in the oceans, not necessarily in equilibrium (=synchronized) with atmospheric O and a proxy for average global temperatures. They are good indicators for general trends, so to understand the range of temperatures in a given period, but for very short periods of time they are unable to provide a measure of the rate of change. +3 degrees in a million year is manageable by many species,+3° in a century it isn't.
As a geologist: we are not concerned about the change, we are concerned about the rate of change. The fastest is the change, the largest number of groups of organisms will be exinct.
As a geologist I'm intrigued by the possibility of adding such 'fog of war' but I believe that, if possible, it will make these palaeogeographic reconstructions a little pointless.
First of all you have to define what you mean by "have no idea about". Even if there aren't any outcropping rocks of a given area representing a given geologic time span, it doesn't mean that we cannot know anything about their previous existence. We can collect palaeographic information from many proxies, e.g.: single crystals in sandstone, presence of ophiolites, plate motion speeds, residual soils characteristics, fossils, accretionary arcs' structure, ocean water palaeo-geochemistry, sea level changes, teleseismic data, metamorphic rocks among many others. Even a lack of information is an information sometimes. In some cases we can have more info about a subducted area than of a "ever existing" inner craton.
Geological record is discontinuous by nature, everywhere. If a strict "only rocks outcropping in the same form they were emplaced" rule would be enforced, only a few pixels will be visible. A map of the uncertainties will be really interesting, I agree, but it will be multidimensional and not easy to read on 2D.
Geologist here: no. Geomagnetic field reversed thousands of times in the Phanerozoic (last 650 My) without any relation with mass extinction events. Organisms can deal with this kind of events.
- does it have any impact on, you know, the farms you're putting it on?
These two questions probably already have an answer: we already grow plants, vegetables, fruit trees on basaltic soils (soils formed by the erosion of basaltic rocks). Some European countries have almost only them, like Iceland, Albania, Montenegro. Usually the crops are excellent, and benefits directly from this natural fertilizer e.g. some Italian wines. These rocks also help to capture water in arid regions, btw. We are also plenty of real world experiments of adding these substances to other ecosystems: every basaltic volcanic eruption distribute a dust cloud around the vent, usually in an area of hundreds km^2, influencing the environment.