Hoagland's wet dream

        Richard Hoagland was invited for the first hour of Coast to Coast AM last night, primarily to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's "I believe this nation should commit itself..." speech to Congress. Surprise, surprise, he was half right about Kennedy. JFK really was rather keen on a joint US/USSR Moon program. The other half—that he was assassinated for that reason—is the usual rubbish, for reasons this blog has already explained.

        In the second half-hour, however, he was ignoring the truth as usual, mis-reporting two recent findings in planetary science. His versions of these stories were SO wrong that one wonders if he was paying any attention to his sources at all.

Beachfront property on the Moon?
To quote the C2C program summary verbatim, he said this:

"the moon has as much water inside it as the Earth has in its oceans."

        Yes, he did, he really did. So, let's see: Volume of the oceans is about 1.3 x 10⁹ km³. That means the planet is 1 part in about 850 water. Volume of the Moon is 2.2 x 10¹⁰ km³. If what Hoagland said were really true, old devil Moon would be 1 part in 17 water. Those Apollo astronauts would have needed waders, not lunar boots, to get around.

        So what was the real story on lunar water? It was a Science Express article by Erik H. Hauri et al. titled "High Pre-Eruptive Water Contents Preserved in Lunar Melt Inclusions." The discovery was microscopic melt inclusions in some Apollo 17 samples which originated from volcanic eruptions, and so came from deep down. The proportion of water was from 615 to 1410 ppm (cf. lunar volcanic glasses <= 50 ppm.) This is comparable with upper mantle rocks on Earth, and the point is that these inclusions are tightly sealed so that water would not escape even at volcanic temperatures (and, perhaps more to the point, the kind of temperature that would be generated by the impact theory of the Moon's origin.) Note the word microscopic in the above explanation. It does not mean that waves are crashing on beaches in the Sea of Tranquility. Hoagland is utterly, totally, spectacularly, WRONG.

Mars as an embryo
        The second story he got wrong was a report in the May 26th Nature by Nicolas Dauphas at the University of Chicago and Ali Pourmand at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science, "Hf–W–Th evidence for rapid growth of Mars and its status as a planetary embryo." This was a highly sophisticated isotope ratio analysis of martian meteorites, showing that Mars probably accreted from proto-planetary dust in as little as two to four million years, as compared with 50 to 100 million for the other terrestrial planets. That would explain its small size, and would class it as a so-called embryo planet (I'm more used to the term planetismal.) Science Daily has a good summary here.

        Hoagland somehow managed to force this news to confirm one of his hobby-horse theories, borrowed from Tom Van Flandern (with acknowledgement)—that Mars was once the moon of Planet X. It goes without saying that absolutely nothing in the work of Dauphas and Pourmand supports this or even so much as mentions it in passing.

        Two more colossal boo-boos by Coast to Coast. And they don't give a shit, of course.

Update:
        Hoagland turned up on C2C again last night, 15th June, and clarified his wet dream — somewhat. He said Moon and Earth have the same amount of water but "pound for pound. That's what got some people confused." Maybe he was thinking of his former co-author as one of the confused.

        He went on to say that he estimated the total quantity as "about the size of a lake like the Caspian Sea." Well, I don't know where he got that from, but we have to applaud the steady climb-down from "as much as all the oceans" to "the Caribbean Sea" to "the Caspian." He still thinks it's all accessible to future lunar colonists, though, and that's still WRONG WRONG WRONG.