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Earth’s Layers
• Based on Discover God’s Creation
Chapter 2-3 by Rebecca Fraker
Earth’s Layers
See Discover God’s Creation (Red) 2-3
• Earthquake waves are used by geologists to
study Earth’s interior.
• Because earthquake waves travel at different
speeds through different materials, they give us
a glimpse of what the inside layers of Earth are
made of.
• Earth is designed somewhat like a baseball with
different layers.
These layers are
called the:
Crust
Mantle
Core
The Crust
• The crust is the thin outer layer of Earth
that corresponds to the cover of a
baseball.
• The crust is made of dirt and rocks and is
mostly covered by oceans.
• The crust is 4-70 kilometers (3-40 miles)
thick and is the thinnest of Earth’s layers.
• Because we live on the crust, we know
more about it than the other layers.
• When you dig
down through
the crust, you
find that the
deeper you go,
the warmer it
gets.
• This heat is
caused by
processes
taking place
deep within
Earth.
Miners feel this hear as they travel
down very deep mine shafts. This
heat causes oil from 2000 feet deep
oil wells to more than 100 degrees!
Plates
• The crust is broken into large pieces called
plates. The plates under the ocean are thinner
than the plates that make up the continents.
Mantle
• In the early 1900s a
Yugoslavian scientist
discovered that
earthquake waves
changed speed as
they traveled through
different kinds of rock
layers.
• This discovery helped
geologists learn about
Earth’s mantle.
The mantle is the thickest of the three layers. It is
1800 miles thick and makes up four-fifths of
Earth’s volume.
• Because of intense heat created by the weight of
the crust and radioactive process, the mantle is
made of melted rock called magma.
• The lava of volcanoes comes from this magma.
Lava is magma pushed up to the surface from
the mantle.
Core
• Earth’s core is the innermost layer. It
makes up a little less than one-fifth of the
Earth’s volume.
• The core has a diameter of about 4400
miles.
• The outer core is thought to be made of
molten iron.
• Within the outer core lies the solid and
very heavy inner core, the center of the
Earth
How deep have we gone?
• The Kola Superdeep Borehole (KSDB)
was a scientific drilling project of the
USSR to drill into the Earth's crust. The
drilling began on May 24, 1970 on the
Kola Peninsula. A number of boreholes
were made from a central branch. The
deepest, SG-3, was completed in 1989,
creating a hole 12.262 kilometers
(seven miles) deep, the deepest hole
ever made by humans.
The Kola Borehole
• The United states had a project called
“Mohole”. Today, there are deep drilling
projects around the world.
• Research some of these projects. What
they discovered was different than what was
expected.
• One project even started an “urban
legend” that said that scientists had
drilled into “hell” and let bat like demons
out! (This was not true, of course. Can
you prove it couldn’t be true from the
Bible?)