Layers of the Earth. What is beneath us?

You live on Earth, a huge mass travelling through space that orbits the sun. But what is the layer of Earth you are on right called? And do you know what all the layers that form our planet are called?
Earth has distinct layers within it. Let’s start with the outer most and thinnest layer, the crust.
There are two parts to the crust, one part being the Oceanic crust, which the oceans sit on, and is around 5-8 kilometres deep. It is mainly made of basalt which is a type of Igneous (or volcanic) rock.

The other part is the continental crust, which is what we live on. This varies from around 8 kilometres to 70 kilometres and is largely made of another igneous rock called Granite.
The next layer is the mantle. Mainly composed of silicate rock and minerals, the mantle is about 2900 kilometres thick, which makes it the thickest layer of Earth, also making up 85% of the earths total weight!

This again can be split into two distinct layers, the upper and lower mantle.
The outer part of the upper mantle is like the crust but much cooler and rigid. The crust and outer upper mantle together is called the lithosphere. The lithosphere is broken into large pieces which make up Earths tectonic plates.

These plates sit on the inner part of the upper mantle called the asthenosphere. The rock here is softer and partially molten as temperatures rise to 3,000° degrees Celsius.
The lower mantle is just as hot as the upper, the rocks being hot enough to melt, but remain solid due to the pressure being pushed down on it.

The lower mantle is slowly moving due to convection currents, which is when deeper hotter material rises, then cools and sinks again. This is what is thought to move the Earth’s tectonic plates, shaping Earth’s continents as we know them today.

The outer core is the layer surrounding the inner core. It is approximately 2,400 kilometres thick mostly made up of liquid Iron and nickel at a temperature between 4,000 – 6,000° degrees Celsius. The flow of the liquid here is what creates Earth’s magnetic field.

The inner core is the hottest part of Earth with temperatures between 5000-6000° degrees Celsius. that is as hot as the surface of the sun. It is roughly 1400 kilometres thick and is also primarily iron and nickel. The air pressure here is three million times that of sea level which causes the core to become solid metal.

The deepest humans have ever explored is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which was a Soviet Union scientific drilling project between 1970 and 1994 that drilled a mere 9 inch wide hole 12kilometres deep into the Earth. One of the most exciting findings was that of microscopic fossils found in rocks nearly 7 kilometres deep that were 2 billion years old! Very little research has been done about the layers below our feet, just imagine what else might be down there!

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Видео Layers of the Earth. What is beneath us? канала Beautiful Science