Earths Innards Have you ever tried to dig

Earth’s Innards

Have you ever tried to dig to China?

How far did you get? Do you think anyone could journey to the center of the earth?

This well is about 4 meters deep – I bet you didn’t get this far!

The deepest known cave is just over 2 kilometers deep. (Krubera Cave in Abkhazia, Georgia. )

The deepest mine in the world is the Tau Tona gold mine in South Africa. It is 3. 8 kilometers deep.

We can DRILL deeper than we can dig. Oil drills reach from 5 to 8 kilometers deep! But we have still barely scratched the surface!!!!

So how deep is it anyway? ? ? 12, 742 km This is the diameter of the earth. How deep would you have to drill just to get to the center? (Hint: Halfway through!)

The deepest hole drilled into Earth is the Kola Peninsula Superdeep Borehole in Russia - - the plan was to reach the mantle. After 19 years, they had only gotten 12, 262 meters deep! (It is really hard to drill that deep!) How much deeper would you need to drill to make it all the way to the center of the earth? How about all the way through to the other side?

Humans have never even made it through to the mantle! (There is currently a project underway in Japan attempting to drill through oceanic crust to the mantle. )

Think of how thin an apple skin is: The earth’s crust is even thinner compared to the rest of the earth than the apple skin is compared to the rest of the apple!

You have learned about the three main layers of the earth:

But now we can see it’s a little more complicated than that:

Even though we won’t be digging to China, we’ll be learning lots of cool stuff about the earth!

The End!