Planet Earth, explained

Our home planet provides us with life and protects us from space.
BYMICHAEL GRESHKO

7 MIN READ

Earth, our home planet, is a world unlike any other. The third planet
from the sun, Earth is the only place in the known universe confirmed
to host life.

With a radius of 3,959 miles, Earth is the fifth largest planet in our solar
system, and it's the only one known for sure to have liquid water on its
surface. Earth is also unique in terms of monikers. Every other solar
system planet was named for a Greek or Roman deity, but for at least a
thousand years, some cultures have described our world using the
Germanic word “earth,” which means simply “the ground.”

3:17
EARTH 101
Earth is the only planet known to maintain life. Find out the origins of our home planet and some of
the key ingredients that help make this blue speck in space a unique global ecosystem.

Our dance around the sun

Earth orbits the sun once every 365.25 days. Since our calendar years
have only 365 days, we add an extra leap day every four years to account
for the difference.

Though we can't feel it, Earth zooms through its orbit at an average
velocity of 18.5 miles a second. During this circuit, our planet is an
average of 93 million miles away from the sun, a distance that takes
light about eight minutes to traverse. Astronomers define this distance
as one astronomical unit (AU), a measure that serves as a handy cosmic
yardstick.

Earth rotates on its axis every 23.9 hours, defining day and night for
surface dwellers. This axis of rotation is tilted 23.4 degrees away from
the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun, giving us seasons. Whichever
hemisphere is tilted closer to the sun experiences summer, while the
hemisphere tilted away gets winter. In the spring and fall, each
hemisphere receives similar amounts of light. On two specific dates
each year—called the equinoxes—both hemispheres get illuminated
equally.

Many layers, many features

About 4.5 billion years ago, gravity coaxed Earth to form from the
gaseous, dusty disk that surrounded our young sun. Over time, Earth's
interior—which is made mostly of silicate rocks and metals—
differentiated into four layers.

At the planet's heart lies the inner core, a solid sphere of iron and nickel
that's 759 miles wide and as hot as 9,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The inner
core is surrounded by the outer core, a 1,400-mile-thick band of iron
and nickel fluids. Beyond the outer core lies the mantle, a 1,800-mile-
thick layer of viscous molten rock on which Earth's outermost layer, the
crust, rests. On land, the continental crust is an average of 19 miles
thick, but the oceanic crust that forms the seafloor is thinner—about
three miles thick—and denser.

Like Venus and Mars, Earth has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes. But
unlike its rocky siblings, almost 70 percent of Earth's surface is covered
in oceans of liquid water that average 2.5 miles deep. These bodies of
water contain 97 percent of Earth's volcanoes and the mid-ocean ridge ,
a massive mountain range more than 40,000 miles long.

Earth's crust and upper mantle are divided into massive plates that
grind against each other in slow motion. As these plates collide, tear
apart, or slide past each other, they give rise to our very active geology.
Earthquakes rumble as these plates snag and slip past each other. Many
volcanoes form as seafloor crust smashes into and slides beneath
continental crust. When plates of continental crust collide, mountain
ranges such as the Himalaya are pushed toward the skies.

Protective fields and gases

Earth's atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and one
percent other gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and argon.
Much like a greenhouse, this blanket of gases absorbs and retains heat.
On average, Earth's surface temperature is about 57 degrees
Fahrenheit; without our atmosphere, it'd be zero degrees. In the last
two centuries, humans have added enough greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere to raise Earth's average temperature by 1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit. This extra heat has altered Earth's weather patterns in
many ways.

The atmosphere not only nourishes life on Earth, but it also protects it:
It's thick enough that many meteorites burn up before impact from
friction, and its gases—such as ozone—block DNA-damaging ultraviolet
light from reaching the surface. But for all that our atmosphere does,
it's surprisingly thin. Ninety percent of Earth's atmosphere lies within
just 10 miles of the planet's surface .
The silhouette of a woman is seen on a Norwegian island beneath the Northern Lights (aurora
borealis).
PHOTOGRAPH BY GARCIA JULIEN, GETTY IMAGES

We also enjoy protection from Earth's magnetic field, generated by our

planet's rotation and its iron-nickel core. This teardrop-shaped field
shields Earth from high-energy particles launched at us from the sun
and elsewhere in the cosmos. But due to the field's structure, some
particles get funneled to Earth's Poles and collide with our atmosphere,
yielding aurorae, the natural fireworks show known by some as the
northern lights.

Spaceship Earth
Earth is the planet we have the best opportunity to understand in detail
—helping us see how other rocky planets behave, even those orbiting
distant stars. As a result, scientists are increasingly monitoring Earth
from space. NASA alone has dozens of missions dedicated to solving our
planet's mysteries.
At the same time, telescopes are gazing outward to find other Earths.
Thanks to instruments such as NASA's Kepler Space Telescope,
astronomers have found more than 3,800 planets orbiting other stars,
some of which are about the size of Earth , and a handful of which orbit
in the zones around their stars that are just the right temperature to be
potentially habitable. Other missions, such as the Transiting Exoplanet
Survey Satellite, are poised to find even more.

SOURCES
NASA Science Solar System Exploration - Earth
NOAA Ocean Explorer - Mid-Ocean Ridge
NOAA Climate - Climate Change
NASA - Kepler and K2 Missions
IPAC/Caltech - Cool Cosmos
NASA Exoplanet Archive

From : Planet Earth facts and information (nationalgeographic.com)