Work that needs to be done

Question 1

How does funding affect measurements?

Answer 1

Project attractiveness for funding often means that scientists have to focus their measurements on areas of elevated heat flow, and research funding is more readily available in some countries than others, hence the spatial bias.

Question 2

How does data quality affect measurements?

Answer 2

Data quality also tends to vary depending on instruments used and care taken in eliminating measurement uncertainties, so that some data sets will become sparser after ‘bad data’ are filtered out

Question 3

What needs to be corrected?

Answer 3

Need to correct estimates of heat loss for earth interior for changes in surface geology

Question 4

Why is this tricky? What do they need?

Answer 4

This is tricky because we need:
Good maps of rock types, e.g. because different types of crustal rocks produce different amounts of heat due to radioactivity
Their age, because radioactive heat generation varies with age, even in the same rock type
Their thermotectonic history, because rock units recently heated by tectonic or volcanic processes can retain that heat for long times, compared to a neighbouring unit of the same rock type not exposed