Earth’s Internal Structure

Remember that:
 The decrease in temperature caused those substances with high melting points to condense into
tiny particles that began to coalesce (join together).
 Materials such as iron and nickel and the elements of which the rock-forming minerals are com
posed—silicon, calcium, sodium, and so forth—formed metallic and rocky clumps that orbited the
Sun.
 Repeated collisions caused these masses to coalesce into larger asteroid size bodies, called
planetesimals, which in a few tens of millions of years accreted into the four inner planets.

Formation of Earth’s Layered Structure

 As material accumulated to form Earth (and for a short period afterward), the high-velocity impact
of nebular debris and the decay of radioactive elements caused the temperature of our planet to
increase steadily.

 During this time of intense heating, Earth became hot enough that iron and nickel began to melt.
 Melting produced liquid blobs of dense metal that sank toward the center of the planet.
 This process occurred rapidly on the scale of geologic time and produced Earth’s dense iron-rich
core.
Chemical Differentiation and Earth’s Layers
 The early period of heating resulted in another process of chemical differentiation, whereby
melting formed buoyant masses of molten rock that
rose toward the surface, where they solidified to
produce a primitive crust. These rocky materials were
enriched in oxygen and “oxygen-seeking”
elements, particularly silicon and aluminum, along with
lesser amounts of calcium, sodium, potassium, iron,
and magnesium.
 In addition, some heavy metals such as gold, lead, and
uranium, which have low melting points or were highly
soluble in the ascending molten masses, were
scavenged from Earth’s interior and concentrated in the developing crust.
 This early period of chemical differentiation established the three basic divisions of Earth’s
interior: the iron-rich core; the thin primitive crust; and Earths largest layer, called the mantle,
which is located between the core and crust.
An Atmosphere Develops
 An important consequence of the early period of chemical differentiation is that large
quantities of gaseous materials were allowed to escape from Earth’s interior, as happens
today during volcanic eruptions.
 By this process, a primitive atmosphere gradually evolved. It is on this planet, with this
atmosphere, that life as we know it came into existence.
Earth’s Internal Structure
Methods to Infer Earth’s Interior??
There are several methods that enable us to infer about the earth’s
interior:
1- Xenoliths
 Xenoliths are like chocolate chunks in a cookie dough; pieces of
mantle within the lava (foreign rock inclusions in an igneous
rock).
 Xenoliths provide information about the lower crust and the upper mantle.
 They are a storehouse of valuable information about the composition of continental and
oceanic crusts that the otherwise inaccessible Mantle, does not provide.
 The presence of coarse-grained Olivine (Peridotite) in basaltic lavas is one such example which
has been brought up from far below.
 Xenoliths range in size from a grain of sand to that of a boulder, being as big as a foot.

2- Ophiolites
 Ophiolites are rich in iron-magnesium silicate minerals that once originated deep within the
earth's interior.
 Now lying on the surface, they are unstable and hence, convert
rapidly into hydrated magnesium silicate minerals,
forming serpent-like bands with vivid green/brown colors
in the rock. Hence, the name Ophiolites (in Greek ‘ophis’,
means snake, and ‘lithos’, means rock)
 The Ophiolites provide another line of direct evidence of the
earth's interior.
 They are sections of the earth’s oceanic crust and the
underlying upper mantle that has been uplifted or emplaced and exposed within the
continental crustal rocks and characterize an assemblage of rocks that are formed at
spreading ridges.
3- Volcanism
 Volcanism (both Recent and Ancient i.e.. Paleovolcanism) provides another evidence of
information about the upper mantle.
 Paleovolcanologic studies reveal the geodynamical conditions that existed at the time of
eruption.
 Such a study helps to identify belts of paleo-ridges, zones of paleo-spreading and paleo-
transform faults.

4- Drilling
 Drilling, as a tool to understand the earth's interior, is limited to few
kilometers below due to increased geothermal gradient within the
earth's crust (with each km depth the temperature increases by ~ 25 °C.
the temperature gradient).
 Most drilled holes are in the upper 7 km of the crust and the deepest
one (the Kola Superdeep Borehole drilled from 1989 to 1994) is about
12 km deep in the northern Kola Peninsula, NW Soviet Union, Russia.
The rocks encountered were 2.7 billion years old.
5- Meteorites
 They provide excellent information about the earth’s interior and are thought to be remnants
of the core and mantle of other planetary bodies from within the Solar System; all of which
were formed at the same time and from the same
material as our earth.
 Stony meteorites are very similar in composition to the
materials that we find within the Xenoliths and at the
bottom of Ophiolites.
 The earth’s mantle is made out of Peridotite which is the
same material that is also found in Ophiolites, Xenoliths,
and in Stony meteorites.
6- Seismic Waves
 The seismic waves provide the most comprehensive picture of the earth's interior.
 The particular velocity at which a seismic wave travels through a layer gives clues about the
chemical composition of the layer.
 If the earth were of the same composition, then seismic waves would, like any other wave,
take longer to travel further and die out in velocity and strength with increasing distance (this
decrease is called Attenuation).
 However, down ~ 200 km. the seismic waves arrive with higher velocities than those within a
200 km radius indicating the presence of a denser layer below; the seismic waves travel faster
in denser material.
 Based on this fact, scientists detected a boundary within the earth's interior, a boundary
between the crust and a denser layer below, the mantle.
 This crust-mantle boundary is also called the Mohorovicic discontinuity (better known as
Moho), in honor of its Croatian discoverer.
 Such sudden jumps in seismic velocities across a boundary are called Seismic discontinuities.
 Hence, a systematic study of the waves and their propagation gives a robust idea about the
earth's interior, its structure and composition.