Natural forces are continuing to form oil now at a rate of hundreds to thousands of barrels per year.
The oil production process can leave behind about two barrels of oil in the ground for every one barrel that is pumped out.
By the time solar energy and light reaches Earth, there is not much energy left. The solar constant is the amount of radiation that actually hits the Earth. Its value is about 29.4 MJ (Megajoules) per square meter each day. This flow of enery is constant, measuring 29.4 MJ at the top of Earth's atmosphere. At the surface, only about 17 MJ arrives. Between the top of Earth's atmosphere and the surface, energy and certain types of electromagnetic radiation such as infrared and ultraviolet have been filtered away.
From above, Earth receives solar energy of 17 * 1013 kW per day. The average solar power available is only about 0.0024 Watts for each square centimeter of ground surface illuminated by our Sun.
From below, the average value of heat flow that reaches Earth's suface from the interior is about 6.3 * 10-6 J/cm2/s. The heat arriving at 1 m2 of Earth would take roughly 14 days to bring a cup of water to boil. Heat flow from the interior is by conduction, meaning the heat is transmitted through the rock and passes from atom to atom.
World tidal power approaches up to 1.1 * 109 kW per annum.
The weight of the earth is 6.6 * 1021 tons.
The Earth's official consortium of timekeepers, officials from around the globe, will add a leap second to the world's atomic clocks at the end of the year to keep the official atomic time synchronized with natural time as determined by the spin of our planet. The leap second will be added to more than 60 atomic clocks operating around the world so that we can keep track of time with an accuracy of 10 billionths of a second per day.
The old-fashioned way of measuring time, based on when the sun rises and sets, is good to about one thousandth of a second per day. Scientists try to keep the atomic clocks, which are based on the vibration rates of cesium or hydrogen atoms, within nine-tenths of a second of the Earth's rotation time. Because the Earth is slowing down, scientists have had to add 22 leap seconds since 1972.
A leap second will be inserted just before midnight -- Greenwich Mean Time -- on New Year's Eve, the US Naval Observatory announced 2005-12-23. This will be the 23rd leap second that has been inserted since 1972 when an international timekeeping agreement was signed, according to the US Naval Observatory. The last one was inserted seven years ago [ 1998 ].