Earth’s Innards Have you ever tried to dig to China?

Before continuing, write a few sentences in your Journal about this topic. How far did you get? Do you think anyone could journey to the center of the ?

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

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

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???

This is the diameter of the earth. How deep would you have to drill just to get to the center? (Halfway through) The deepest hole drilled into Earth is the Kola Peninsula Superdeep Borehole in - - 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 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 you will see it’s a little more complicated than that:

There are two terms included in this diagram that are probably new to you that end in “sphere.” Go to www.dictionary.com to find the definitions of these terms. Write them in your Journal and listen to their pronunciations. Last, write down at least three things you want to know about the earth.