A thermoelectric hypothesis for the cause of geothermal anomaly

• 1、School of Metallurgical Science and Engineering, Central South University

Abstract：To investigate the formation mechanism of the geothermal anomaly, a hypothesis that attributes the geothermal anomaly to the thermoelectric effect from the relevant knowledge of thermoelectricity, mineralogy and geophysics was proposed in this paper. It was suggested that some unexplained abnormal geothermal phenomena may be caused by the Peltier effect when the earth current flows along the interfaces between two conductive minerals. The earth current arises from either a certain natural electric field or the Seebeck potential originating from the underground temperature gradient. When studying how various types of ice caves in summer and other geothermal abnormity form, we formulated several simple circuit models to conjecture the possible underground circuits, and thus successfully explained the presently known abnormal geothermal phenomena by thermoelectric effects.

Keywords： geothermal anomaly ice cave thermoelectric effect hypothesis