Our magnificent Earth is constantly moving and changing. If we could soar above the Earth, we
would see great valleys, long rivers, and majestic mountains. But what if we could travel deep down
into the earth. From our perspective, the Earth's crust seems very deep. If you think about the
biggest hole you've ever seen or dug, it may seem as if the crust is endless. Let's venture down into
the Earth to see how truly deep it is. If you ever went swimming on our hot summer day and touched
the bottom of the deep end of the pool, you went about two and a half meters or eight feet deep.
In Turkey, there is an ancient underground city called Derinkuyu, residing at a depth of 85 meters or
about 280 feet. Continuing our journey farther down to 137 meters or about 450
feet, this depth matches the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The world's tallest building is
the Burj Khalifa, located in Dubai and the Arabian Peninsula. It's height matches a depth of 828 meters
or 2,717 feet. Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake, is in Russia and it's bottom hits 1,642 meters or
5,387 feet. This is just over one mile deep.
Even the mysterious dark part of the ocean deep has a stopping point and that is the ocean floor.
The average depth of the ocean floor is 3,897 meters or
12,785 feet and the deepest known hydrothermal vents are at almost
5,000 meters or 16,400 feet deep. These vents are formed by deep cracks in the
ocean floor where seawater gets caught, becomes superheated, and is forced back up.
The tallest above sea level mountain in the world is Mount Everest. If it were underground, it's tip to base
would reach a depth of 8,848 meters or 29,029 feet. The Deepwater Horizon was an oil drilling
rig that was placed out in the ocean to drill for oil. It drilled as deep as 9,100 meters
or 30,000 feet, before it exploded in 2010. The Kola Superdeep Borehole, created as a scientific
drilling project by Soviet geologists, reached a depth of 12,262 meters or 40,230
feet before the project had to be abandoned in 1992. That's when the temperature at that
depth got too hot for the drill. The Borehole took almost 20 years to dig and it earned the title of
the deepest human-made hole. However, in 2012, the Z-44 Chayvo Well was completed by the oil and
gas company Exxon, and it became the deepest well on Earth. It is 12,345 meters or 40,502 feet, and it
would fit about 15 of the Burj Khalifa buildings stacked on top of each other. Even at this deepest
point of this human-made hole, we're still not even close to the mantle. While the crust may
seem incomprehensibly thick, in reality Earth's crust is very thin when compared to the rest of
the Earth's layers. The earth has two types of crust; oceanic crust, which makes up the ocean
floor, and continental crust, which is the crust that forms land. Each type of crust is made up of
many different types of rocks and minerals. In the oceanic crust, which is about six to seven
kilometers or three to four miles deep, we find basalt rock formed by the rapid cooling of lava.
In the continental crust, which is about 38 kilometers or 25 miles deep, we find granite. The most common
rock in the Earth's crust. Just below the crust is the mantle, which is also made of rocks and
minerals. The mantle is separated into two layers, the upper mantle and the lower mantle. The upper
mantle, which is closer to the Earth's crust, has lower pressure and cooler temperatures than the
lower mantle. Though it is cooler, the upper mantle still ranges from 1,400 to 3,000 degrees Celsius or
2500 to 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. As a whole, the mantle is in a solid state. However, the topmost
part of the upper mantle is composed of hard rock, whereas the bottom part of the upper mantle has
both hard rock and soft rock that bends and flows. The lower mantle which rests beneath the upper
mantle reaches temperatures of 3,700 degrees Celsius or 6,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Though it's
hot enough to melt rock, it doesn't. It stays solid because the pressure is too high to allow the rock
to melt. Overall, the whole mantle reaches a depth of 2,900 kilometers or about 1,800 miles. You could
think of the mantle as a sandwich cookie, where the top hard cookie is the topmost part of the
upper mantle. The soft cream layer represents the soft bendy rock found in the bottom part of the
upper mantle. Finally, the bottom hard cookie is the lower mantle. Traveling past the mantle, we reach
the outer core of the earth. This layer is liquid and, because it is made mostly of a combination
of the metals iron and nickel, it generates a magnetic field that surrounds the Earth. The
outer core from the bottom of the mantle extends to a depth of 5,150
kilometers or 3,200 miles, and can reach temperatures of up to
5000 degrees Celsius or 9000 Fahrenheit. Finally, the inner core is a solid metal
ball mostly made of nickel and iron that is about 2,500 kilometers or 1,550 miles wide. It can reach
6,000 degrees Celsius or 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even though these temperatures will melt metal, the
core remains solid because of the intense high pressure at this depth. From the crust to the
center of the Earth, if we could truly travel into the depths of our beautiful earth we'd travel about
6,000 kilometers or 4,000 miles, which is about the same distance as going from New York City
to Alaska. You may wonder how geologists were able to discover all these details, since they can't
travel through the Earth and measure the layers. Geologists study rock samples, including younger
rock, such as rocks that have hardened from lava, and older rock, such as rocks that have been in the
Earth for a longer period of time. Geologists also use math to see how long it takes energy waves to
travel through the Earth's layers and how those waves change in direction. How truly small
our homes and communities are when compared to the vastness of Earth. The magnificent parts of
a planet that God in His great wisdom prepared for us to live on and find joy in His creation.