alt Hacker NewsYeah, "accumulate the heat over thousands of years" indeed sounds a bit misleading to me. The heat is largely already there (or is generated pretty uniformly through radioactive processes), it's just slowly transmitted outwards down a gradient.
Yeah, "accumulate the heat over thousands of years" indeed sounds a bit misleading to me. The heat is largely already there (or is generated pretty uniformly through radioactive processes), it's just slowly transmitted outwards down a gradient.
No, the heat is not already there. The heat comes in and goes out; the heat energy initially in the crust decays away exponentially with time and has no effect on the steady stage temperature gradient.