Explain this atmosphere...
- Thread starter Kilgs
- Start date
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
0.62 atm appears to be air pressure compared to earth normal of 14.7 pounds per square inch or about 1.030 kg per square centimeter, or about 1 bar pressure. So, 62 percent of that. Or about the same air pressure as that at 3700 meters altitude on Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_pressure
So, partial pressure of oxygen is = .62 bar times 52% =0.3224 bar. Your atmosphere is breathable. by comparison, Earth's atmosphere has an O2 partial pressure of .21 bar. From above, below 16 bar
Krypton and Argon are inert gasses, and Nitrogen is a major component of earth air, so, its sounds like a good mix. You *might* sound a bit funny, but you have a breathable if thin atmosphere.
13 degrees C = 55 degrees F. So, nice day.
With a 1/3 of earth's gravity, your aircraft wings will produce more lift, even though the air pressure is less.
Last edited:
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
No CO2 present, so no plants present. Might make things a bit difficult, as all food needs to be brought in, and basically, the surface is a desert. Probably the water bodies are also without plants, and no CO2 would also indicate no other life forms present.
Where did this atmosphere come from?
Where did this atmosphere come from?
Just building a setting from Astrosynthesis. I can puzzle out most of the atmospheres but this was kinda on the border of being a garden planet. I thought "this isn't quite close enough to Earth so there should be some major oddities." Argon is about 4x higher than Earth, so I was thinking with the lower pressure that hypoxia may be an issue. The air pressure may be lighter but in composition more dense.
Didn't catch the CO2 issue... thanks. Don't know why that slipped my mind.
The high oxygen v. Nitrogen was also a concern of mine. Earth has 70+ nitrogen and about 20% oxygen. So fires are harder to put out? Do we have too much oxygen?
(And it's a jovian moon... pretty rare that it wasn't tide-locked so I decided it needed to be a populated location.)
Didn't catch the CO2 issue... thanks. Don't know why that slipped my mind.
The high oxygen v. Nitrogen was also a concern of mine. Earth has 70+ nitrogen and about 20% oxygen. So fires are harder to put out? Do we have too much oxygen?
(And it's a jovian moon... pretty rare that it wasn't tide-locked so I decided it needed to be a populated location.)
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
So even on earth, CO2 consentration is trace to almost negligible and we have tons of green stuff.
One could argue that you cannot have O2 in the air without plants. Oxygen too readily combines with carbon, or hydrogen or iron or, well lets face it, Oxygen gets around alot. Without photosynthetic plants, any atmospheric oxygen would soon be depleted.
I was thinking about this last night... maybe it's just a completely tight system? Or (again, I know nothing of science) is this a runaway system? Where CO2 which was once present is now being devoured by a runaway growth/foliage/algae/process such that the world is quickly turning to a new atmosphere and any plant life will be slowly strangled out?
I spent some time rereading Colonial Atlas and Aurore last week and was just amazed at all the little differences those writers put into planetary details based on the minimal specs that they generated on those systems. Unfortunately, I lack any basis in science so until the atmospheric and biospheric contents spontaneously generate lawyers and courts... I'll be annoying you folks.
I spent some time rereading Colonial Atlas and Aurore last week and was just amazed at all the little differences those writers put into planetary details based on the minimal specs that they generated on those systems. Unfortunately, I lack any basis in science so until the atmospheric and biospheric contents spontaneously generate lawyers and courts... I'll be annoying you folks.
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
The atmosphere you have is good. Its thin, but breathable.
Don't sweat the lack of a CO2 spec. As posted earlier, CO2 is a trace gas in Earth's atmosphere. Also due to the nature of O2, if you have O2, you have plant life. Without plant life, the O2 combines with anything else around, and soon it is gone from the atmosphere altogether. I would argue that one would have either CO2, or O2, but only if you have both as significant contributors, would your atmosphere be in transition, or undergoing a "runaway effect".
With all the argon and krypton in the air, lightning storms might be especially interesting, with multicolored lightning.
Don't sweat the lack of a CO2 spec. As posted earlier, CO2 is a trace gas in Earth's atmosphere. Also due to the nature of O2, if you have O2, you have plant life. Without plant life, the O2 combines with anything else around, and soon it is gone from the atmosphere altogether. I would argue that one would have either CO2, or O2, but only if you have both as significant contributors, would your atmosphere be in transition, or undergoing a "runaway effect".
With all the argon and krypton in the air, lightning storms might be especially interesting, with multicolored lightning.
Very cool, thanks. That's the neat thing... little differences result in very cool thematic elements that hammer home "alien planet."
Xerxeskingofking
SOC-13
also, higher oxygen levels would mean certain bodyplans are capable of growing significantly bigger.......
at one point in Earth's history, when oxygen levels were higher, You could get dragonflys with a wingspan of a foot. other insect designs, which currently have a hard limit on size imposed by how much oxygen they can get into thier bodies, could also grow much bigger. think things like hand sized ants, etc.......
not enough to make a real challenge to PC, but enough to seriously spook them......
at one point in Earth's history, when oxygen levels were higher, You could get dragonflys with a wingspan of a foot. other insect designs, which currently have a hard limit on size imposed by how much oxygen they can get into thier bodies, could also grow much bigger. think things like hand sized ants, etc.......
not enough to make a real challenge to PC, but enough to seriously spook them......
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
Couple that with the lower gravity, you can have some seriously monster sized insects. A single hand sized ant may spook them. An army of hand sized ants can ruin their picnic. Imagine the giant mosquitos.
No need to: they are our "state bird" (Minnesota)! :rofl:
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
The Alaskan ones are bigger. During World War 2, they were mistaken for Japanese Zero fighters.
Or 'giant' spiders ... the size of a small dog (or an 'Alien' facehugger)? Unlikely to be web spinners in the conventional sense, even with the lower gravity, but pouncers who hide in an earthen burrow and jump out at anything passing by that vibrates the ground or disturbs web 'tripwires'. At that size I dare say their venom is a real issue ... possibly on a par with some snakes?
There's no CO2; others have pointed it out. Most likely, the report is incomplete: CO2 is only about 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere, and you have 2% of your atmosphere not accounted for, possibly unmentioned trace gases including CO2.
There's one heck of a lot of oxygen, even given the low pressure. Oxygen just loves combining with things; unless something's producing it, it'd combine out, ergo something's producing a whole lotta oxygen. If there's no CO2, that something is not a plant: plants take in CO2 when making O2, and there's no CO2 for them to take in. If - as is most likely - there is CO2 but it just didn't make it into the report, there's either one heck of a lot of O2 producing life or there's some O2 producing process in addition to the local life. A lot of Earth's O2 comes from the oceans - phytoplankton, algae. Warmer oceans? The planet overall is a bit cooler on average; maybe the equatorial belt is dominated by ocean; land masses are above and below that.
There's about 4 times as much argon as shows up in Earth's atmosphere. Most of our argon comes from decay of radioactive potassium; this world has more radioactive potassium than we have here.
There's several orders of magnitude more krypton in the atmosphere than in Earth's - I mean, tens of thousands of times more. Krypton has quite a few isotopes. I haven't the foggiest where the stable ones come from nor how they'd get into an atmosphere in such quantities. Most of the unstable ones have really short half lives thatcouldn't account for this. There is one with a half life of about 10 years; it's produced by fission of uranium, and it could possibly be the culprit. One possibility therefore is this planet has one whopping lot of uranium, in quantities sufficient to permit natural fission. The other is that this planet was very recently blasted to hell and gone with nuclear weapons - or the planet is a target range where the IN practices nuclear bombardment. Seems kinda pricey, but maybe there's specific study that needs actual bombs to go off.
So, very speculative, but: you've got a coolish world where the equatorial region is mostly water, lots of algae and other O2 producers in the seas, and the land area was recently subjected to a ferocious nuclear bombardment. It is probably not healthy to spend much time on land here.
Xerxeskingofking
SOC-13
According to Wiki, their is a isotope of Kryton (krypton-81) that is the "product of reactions with cosmic rays that strike the atmosphere", and has a fairly long half life (229,000 years). their are also several stable isotopes, of course.
It would be an intresting question as to what could have caused so much very high energy rays to strike the world. the half life would allow such an event to be within the range for Ancient activity......
It would be an intresting question as to what could have caused so much very high energy rays to strike the world. the half life would allow such an event to be within the range for Ancient activity......
Krypton 81 is produced from cosmic ray interactions with stable Krypton 80. It therefore does not answer the question of where all the krypton came from in the first place.
Krypton's actually a rather heavy element compared to most atmospheric gases. Nitrogen's atomic weight is 14 (for the most common isotope) and it tends to occur as N2. Oxygen is 16, tends to occur as O2. Argon's atomic weight's 40 (ditto) and, like Krypton, it's a noble gas, therefore monatomic. Even CO2 is lighter than elemental Krypton. Hard to find an atmospheric element big enough to produce krypton by cosmic ray in any quantity - other than krypton.
Beyond the nuclear holocaust scenario, it's also possible that this planet is seeing extremely intensive peaceful use of fission. Massive plutonium production, for example. Really massive. Omigod-providing-nuclear-pits-for-the-Navy's-missiles-for-the-entire-sector massive. Which would suggest that there are either truly massive deposits of uranium here or that it's being shipped in from elsewhere - in immense quantities - to be processed in the factories here.
Estimates of the mass of Earth's atmosphere hit around 5x10^18 kg. We don't know the size of this world but surface gravity of 0.36 suggests it's around a size 3, which means roughly 1/20 the volume of Earth. Atmosphere's 2/3 Earth normal, so this world's atmosphere is - if I'm calculating this right, I may not be - about 3% of Earth's atmospheric mass, 1.5x10^17 kg. Krypton's 3% of the atmosphere - is that by weight or by molecule? I don't know how they work that. Figure 4.5x10^15 kg of krypton in the atmosphere. Given the half life, that suggests around 2.2x10^14 kg of krypton being vented to the atmosphere annually. Hundreds of billions of tons of the stuff. Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude or two, that's a mind-numbing large quantity of krypton being vented into the atmosphere. The number of missiles that could be produced while venting that much krypton - the amount of uranium being processed through breeder reactors to produce the plutonium - is incredible, as is the power available from doing fission on that scale.
But then, the number of nuclear explosions required to put that much krypton in the air is just as huge. Just supplying a fleet with missiles for such an undertaking would be a massive transport effort, and the fleet doing the work would be pretty massive itself.
Lycanorukke
SOC-13
Or go the Oklo Reactor route. Naturally occuring concentrations of transuranics have been simmering away for a few million years and spitting out decay products.
BlackBat242
SOC-14 1K
Or that was just the storage dump for spent reactor fuel from a VERY ancient civilization. :rofl:
:smirk:
:smirk:
Lycanorukke
SOC-13
And if you find pictures of cats in the dump, Marc hunts you down for stealing Mission to Mithril?
