Earths Interior

An In-Depth Look into our Home Planet

Mt. Etna, Italy

Earths Interior
What is one of the first things you notice about a diagram of the Earths interior?

Distinct Layering
The heaviest materials (metals) appear in the center. The lighter solids (rocks) occupy the middle. The less dense fluids and gases are found at the top.
Iron-nickel core, rocky mantle and crust, the liquid ocean, and the gaseous atmosphere.

How did we get all of those layers?

Lets say we have a plastic bottle containing the following materials:
Pebbles Sand Mud Water Air

 What happens when you fill the bottle with all of the materials and shake it? What happens when you stop shaking it?

Application to the Earth

We can apply the previous experiment to the Earth.
The young Earth was molten and composed of a uniform mixture of iron, nickel, silicates, water, and gases. As the Earth cooled, similar elements began to group together.
This led to the formation of layers in the Earth.

What is this called?

Differentiation

Differentiation
What causes layers to form within a planet? The force of gravity is responsible for the Earths layers.
What can we infer from this piece of information? Is this true for the Earth?

Iron-nickel core, rocky mantle and crust, the liquid ocean, and the gaseous atmosphere.

Seeing Earths Layers

The best way to see inside the Earth would be to dig or drill a hole to examine it.
Unfortunately, this is only possible at shallow depths.

The deepest drill hole ever to penetrate the Earth reached a depth of only 7.5 miles.
Thats only 1/500th of the way to the Earths center. Yet this was an extraordinary feat considering the rapid increase in temperature and pressure with depth.

Seismic Waves
Fortunately for seismologists, many earthquakes are large enough that their seismic waves travel all the way through Earth.
This means they can be detected on the other side of the Earth.

Seismic waves allow us to see into the Earth.

It is like flipping the switch on an X-ray machine.

 However, unlike an X-ray in which the picture is clearly shown, seismic waves are much more complex. Seismic waves usually do not travel along in straight paths.
Instead, they are reflected, refracted, and diffracted as they pass through the different layers of the Earth.

Seismic Wave Behaviors

Reflection reflection off of the boundaries between layers. Refraction occurs when passing from one layer into another.
Much like light bending as it passes from air to water.

Diffraction a seismic wave will diffract around obstacles they encounter.

Reflection
Change in composition cause seismic waves to reflect off boundaries between layers.
This helped us identify the different layers.

This characteristic of waves is especially important in the exploration for oil and natural gas.
Artificially generated seismic waves are used to find reservoirs. Without seismic imaging, a huge number of wells would have to be randomly drilled to find oil.

Seismic Wave Behavior

Seismic waves travel at different speeds.
Remember P, S, and surface waves?

The speed at which seismic waves travel through the Earths surface depends largely on the properties of the materials encountered.
Waves travel faster in stiff (rigid) rock.

This is just one of the pieces of information used to identify temperature and composition of layers.

Seismic Wave Behavior

One of the most noticeable behaviors of seismic waves is that they follow strongly curved paths. This is because their velocities generally increase with depth.
Due to pressure increases which squeeze the rock into a more compact, rigid material.

 Three snapshots showing the locations of S waves within Earths mantle following an earthquake.

Earths Layers
With the advancement in seismic technology, seismologists have made important discoveries about the compositions of Earths layers.
Crust Mantle Core

Crust
Earths crust consists of two distinct types:
Continental crust Oceanic crust

Continental and oceanic crusts have very different compositions, histories, and ages.

Oceanic Crust
Oceanic crust is compositionally more similar to the mantle than continental crust. Averages about 4.5 miles thick. Forms at mid-ocean ridges. P waves travel through oceanic crust at a consistent rate (~5 7 km/hr).
This tells us the composition of oceanic crust is quite uniform.

Continental Crust
While oceanic crust is fairly uniform, no two continental regions have the same structures or composition. Averages 25 miles in thickness.
Can be up to 45 miles thick in mountainous regions such as the Andes and Himalayas.

Seismic velocities within continents are quite variable.

Tells us that the composition also varies greatly.

The Moho
The Moho is the boundary between the crust and the mantle.
It was one of the first features of the Earths interior discovered using seismic waves.

Named after Andrija Mohorovii, a Croatian, who discovered the boundary in 1909. P wave velocities slightly increase at this boundary.

Mantle
More than 82% of the Earths volume is contained within the mantle.
Over 1,800 miles thick.

Because S waves will travel through the mantle, we know that it is a solid rocky layer.
However, despite its rocky nature, rock in the mantle is quite hot and capable of flow (but it is a very slow flow).

The mantle is divided into different sections:

Upper Mantle Lower Mantle

Upper Mantle
Extends from the Moho to a depth of 410 miles. The upper mantle itself can be subdivided into 3 shells:
Lithosphere the uppermost mantle and crust Asthenosphere weak layer beneath lithosphere Transition Zone lower portion of the upper mantle

Upper Mantle
Rocks brought to the surface by volcanism and other geological processes have provided geologists with information about the upper mantle. The velocities at which seismic waves travel through the upper mantle are similar to those of the rock peridotite.
Mantle peridotite, an ultramafic rock composed of olivine and pyroxenes, is richer in iron and magnesium than rocks found in the crust.

Transition Zone
The transition zone lies at the lowest portions of the upper mantle. It is called a transition zone because seismic waves are reflected off of this boundary.
Just as they are at the Moho.

Composed of the mineral spinel. It is calculated that the Transition Zone contains up to 2% of its weight in water.
This means it could potentially hold up to 5X the volume of Earths oceans.

Lower Mantle
The lower mantle lies between the transition zone and the liquid core. The lower mantle is undoubtedly the Earths largest layer.
Composes 56% of the volume of our planet.

The lower mantle is composed of the mineral perovskite.

This makes perovskite the single most abundant material within Earth.

The D Layer
In the bottom few hundred miles of the mantle, a highly variable and unusual layer occurs.
Pronounced Dee Double Prime Layer

It is a boundary layer between the rocky mantle and the liquid iron outer core. The D layer is thought to be a graveyard for some of the subducted slabs, and the birthplace for mantle plumes.

The D Layer
At the very base of the D layer, where the mantle is directly in contact with the hot liquid iron core, there are upside-down mountains that protrude into the core. Also, some of the regions of the D layer may not be hot enough to be partially molten.

Discovering the Core-Mantle Boundary

Evidence that Earth has a distinct central core was uncovered in 1906 by Richard Dixon Oldham.
While studying seismic waves, Oldham observed that P and S waves were weak or absent at distances ~100 from the epicenter of a large earthquake.

In other words, Oldham found evidence for a central core that produced a shadow zone for seismic waves.

 As Oldham predicted, Earths core exhibits different properties from the mantle above.
This causes considerable refraction of P waves.
Similar to how light is refracted as it passes from air to water.

In addition, because the outer core is liquid iron, it blocks the transmission of S waves.

Earths Core
The core accounts for about 1/6 of Earths volume.
Yet it accounts for 1/3rd of Earths mass.

Iron is the most dense of the common elements.

When measured by mass, iron is the most abundant element found within the Earth.

Outer Core
The boundary between the Earths mantle and the outer core, called the core-mantle boundary, is significant due to dramatic properties changes.
Densities increase by almost 2X P wave velocity drops by almost S wave velocity halts to 0

We know that the outer core is in liquid state because:

Inner Core
At the center of the core is a solid sphere of iron with trace amounts of other elements. Because the inner core is an actual sphere, and not a shell like the other layers, drawings make the inner core appear much larger than it really is.
It is actually quite small only 1/142nd the volume of Earth less than 1%!

History of the Inner Core

The inner core did not exist early in Earths history when our planet was hotter. As Earth cooled, iron began to crystallize at the center to form the solid inner core. Even today the inner core continues to grow as the planet cools.

Inner Core
The inner core is separated from the other solid layers by the liquid outer core.
This allows the solid inner core to move freely.

Recent studies suggest that the inner core is actually rotating faster than the crust and the mantle.
Lapping them every few hundred years.

Discovering the Inner/Outer Core Boundary

The boundary between the inner and outer core was discovered in 1936 by Inge Lehman. She was unable to determine whether or not the inner core was actually solid from seismic studies.
She simply applied trigonometry to assert that some P-waves were being strongly refracted by sudden velocity increases.

The ability of a P wave to emerge within a shadow zone confirmed the existence of a solid inner core.

Earths Temperature

Earths Temperature
One way to describe the interior of a planet is to examine how temperature changes with depth. Thermodynamics states that themal energy flows from hotter regions toward colder regions.
Earth is about 10,000F at its center and ~32F at its surface, so heat flows towards the surface.

Cooling Rate of Earth

Heat does not leave Earths surface at the same rate in all locations.
Heat flow is highest near mid-ocean ridges where hot magma is consistently rising toward the surface. Heat flow is the lowest in the deep abyssal plains, which are areas of old, cold oceanic seafloor.

How did Earth get so hot?

Like all of the planets in our solar system, Earth has experienced 2 thermal stages:
1. Occurred during Earths formation and lasted about 50 million years.
During this time, Earth experienced a rapid increase in internal temperature.

2. We are currently in the 2nd stage cooling.

This is a very slow process that has been in action for 4.5 billion years.

Stage 1: Rapid Increase in Temp

Several factors contributed to the early increase in temperature.
Collisions with countless planetesimals (baby planets)
With each collision, kinetic energy was converted into thermal energy.

Short-lived radioactive isotopes decaying to more stable forms release radiogenic heat as by-products. Collision of a Mars-sized object that led to the formation of the Moon.

 If Earths only source of heat was from its early formation and the decay of short-lived radioactive isotopes, our planet would have cooled to a frozen cinder long ago.
Then why are we still hot?

The mantle and the crust also contain long-lived radioactive isotopes that keep our planet cooking as if on a slow burner.

 Half-lives of long-lived radioactive isotopes are billions of years long.

Radioactivity plays a vital role as the source of radiogenic heat keeping mantle convection and plate tectonics in motion for billions of years.

Heat Flow
Heat travels from Earths interior out to space via 3 different mechanisms:
Radiation Convection Conduction

Only two of these processes operate within the Earths interior.

Which two?

Convection
Convection is the transfer of heat by moving material in a fluid-like manner in which hot materials displace those that are cooler (and vice-versa). Convection is the primary means of heat transfer within the Earth.

Convection Cycles
You are familiar with convection if you have ever boiled a pot of water.
The water appears to be rolling rising up in the middle of the pot, then down the sides.

This pattern is called a convection cycle.

Convection cycles occur within the Earths mantle and outer core, and possibly within the inner core as well.

Convection
Convection occurs due to several factors:
Thermal expansion Gravity induced buoyancy Fluidity

When water at the bottom of the pot is heated, it expands and rises (more buoyant), replaces the cooler, denser (less buoyant) water at the top. Gravity is the driving force for convection.

Convection in Outer Space?

Do you think it exists? If you tried to boil water in outer space, with no strong gravity present, you would find that the pot of water would not convect.
Besides the fact that the water probably would not stay in the pot. http://www.gifbin.com/984445