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Does the geothermal activity influence the climate in Iceland?

Iceland has a much more temperate climate than its latitude (~65 degrees) would suggest, thanks to the North Atlantic Current bringing relatively warm water/air so far up north. There is a lot of geothermal activity (geysers, volcanoes) in Iceland,…
Glorfindel
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Is Australia the largest island?

I had participated in a quiz recently and one of the questions was 'which is the largest island in the world?'. I wrote Australia as the answer remembering that it was the 5th largest country in the world and none of the top 4 were islands. However…
Schwarz Kugelblitz
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What caused peak CO2 to rise, starting about 400,000 years ago?

This question assumes the accuracy of this (and similar) charts. Source of image. From the image, CO2 peaked at about 260, perhaps 265 ppm during the interglacial periods between 800,000 years ago to the interglacial which ended about 480,000 years…
userLTK
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Is $\ce{CO_2}$ in photosynthesis the only way for carbon to become organic?

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle, organic carbon has a cycle. My question is how does carbon enter the cycle in first place? As far as I can say, inorganic carbon enters the cycle only as CO2 that is transformed by…
Santiago
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Why don't I have a 1-in-2 chance of getting rained on if the forecast says 50% probability of precipitation?

I'm trying to understand what weather forecasts mean more precisely. As I understand it from reading Wikipedia, blogs, etc., the percentage value for rain/precipitation that you see in a forecast is technically called the "probability of…
mdr
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Is there a hemisphere where there's more land than ocean?

From a previous question, around 40% of the northern hemisphere is land. Would there be a plane splitting the earth into two equal parts, where in one part there are more land than ocean?
arax
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Is there a widely accepted reason for the formation of tafoni?

Expansion of tafoni seems to be based on weathering (seems reasonable enough.) But what creates them in the first place? There are a number of explanations online (Wikipedia lists eight plausible causes!) Many websites trying to give a simplified…
Owen Versteeg
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How can I create a CF compliant netCDF file?

I have been looking for a proper way to create a netCDF file that is compliant with the Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Convention. It is amazing that I can find a compliance checker for NetCDF files at the CF-Metadata web page, but I have…
ZZZ
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How to calculate relative humidity from temperature, dew point, and pressure?

Is there a formula given the temperature, dew point, and pressure to find relative humidity? I have seen several calculators like this one, but I would like to know how to calculate this myself. I am aware that there are several formulas that can…
ReinstateMonica3167040
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Are cattle really contributing to global warming?

Let me be straight up. I'm a physicist, I've no doubt about climate change and the part we play in it. I had been reading about cattle being one of the alleged main causes of climate change. I get that they make methane, and we have a LOT of them,…
R. Rankin
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The Tambora eruption caused the "Year without a summer". How much would such an eruption today affect the output of solar pv on a global scale?

Are there any estimates for the reduction of global solar insolation at the Earth's surface that a Tambora scale eruption would bring? If our electrical power generation became heavily reliant on solar pv would it bring about a substantial…
Mike H
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Could an earthquake create a design in a sand pendulum?

Is it possible for an earthquake to generate such a design in a sand pendulum during an earthquake? I saw an article online describing the story of a shop owner finding one of his pendulums had created this image during an earthquake. I researched…
wolves_vowels
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Continuous lightning for over an hour; is this phenomenon common and does it have a name?

A few months ago, I witnessed something off the coast of Florida that I have never seen in my life. From my apartment, from about 10PM - 12AM, I saw pretty much continuous cloud to cloud lightning. I don't really remember how many strikes a second…
Ovi
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Why is McMurdo Station in Antartica more hostile than Longyearbyen (Norway), while Longyearbyen is closer to the pole?

McMurdo Station in Antartica (operated by the USA) is 77.85 degrees south (and 166.69 east), Longyearbyen (Norway) is the northernmost settlement with scheduled flights all year at 78.24 degrees north (and 15.47 east). Longyearbyen is further north…
Speedphoenix
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Could one say that granites are metamorphic rocks, or not at all?

In my old textbooks, granites used to be part of the metamorphic rocks. Is this still true or not ? If not fully true, to which extent ? Could someone point me towards clear examples or definitions showing they are considered not metamorphic rocks…
Treblig
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