EARTH AS A PLANT

MARYAM SHAFIQUE

Earth, our home planet, is a world unlike any other. The third planet from the sun, Earth is the only place in the know
 EARTH AS A PLANT
DEFINATION
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.”

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.

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.

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.