The acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s
2
and the radius of the Earth is 6.378 million meters. This means that you would fall through the entire Earth in only
42 minutes
!
Would it be possible to travel through the Earth?
Without air, there would be no air resistance
. You would therefore accelerate to incredible speeds as you fall, reaching a maximum speed on the order of tens of thousands of kilometers per hour . You reach earth’s center in a matter of minutes or hours instead of weeks.
Is it possible to tunnel through the Earth?
The simple answer is,
theoretically, yes
. First, let us ignore friction, the rotation of the earth, and other complications, and focus on the case of a hole or tunnel entering the earth at one point, going straight through its center, and coming back to the surface at the opposite side of the planet.
How many miles does it take to drill through the Earth?
Ignoring for a moment how drilling a hole about
7,918 miles
(12,742 kilometers) long through the Earth is virtually impossible, the problem with the 42-minute solution was that it assumed the planet was uniform in density throughout like a marble.
Can you dig a hole to China?
How long would it take to get from Earth to Mars?
On average, the distance between Earth and Mars is 140 million miles, according to Nasa. If you were to reach Mars based on the current speeds of spaceships, it would take
roughly nine months
, according to the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre’s website.
Why can’t we dig to the center of the Earth?
It’s the thinnest of three main layers, yet humans have never drilled all the way through it. Then, the mantle makes up a whopping 84% of the planet’s volume. At the inner core, you’d have to drill through solid iron. This would be especially difficult because
there’s near-zero gravity at the core
.
What would happen if you drilled to the Center of the Earth?
You would just float, being pulled equally by gravity in all directions
. That said, you would still be traveling at an unparalleled speed, so you’d zip right through that awesome feeling pretty quickly. As you pass through Earth’s center, still moving at 6 miles per second, the process would begin to reverse.
What would happen if the Earth stopped rotating?
At the Equator, the earth’s rotational motion is at its fastest, about a thousand miles an hour. If that motion suddenly stopped,
the momentum would send things flying eastward. Moving rocks and oceans would trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. The still-moving atmosphere would scour landscapes.
How deep can a human go underground?
The deepest point ever reached by man is
35,858 feet
below the surface of the ocean, which happens to be as deep as water gets on earth. To go deeper, you’ll have to travel to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, a section of the Mariana Trench under the Pacific Ocean 200 miles southwest of Guam.
Can you fall off the moon?
The moon is just over a quarter of the size of the Earth. But if it had the same mass, then the moon’s gravity would be about 14 times stronger than Earth’s and
you’d hardly be able to jump at all
. If that same mass was squeezed down to the size of a village, it’d become a black hole, and we’d all be sucked into it.
What would happen if you drilled a hole through the Earth and dropped a stone?
It would go up a ways, then (due to the pull of gravity) fall back in the other direction, back towards the center
. This back and forth oscillation around either side of the middle point of the earth continues for a while. Eventually it stops, because all the while there’s air that slows down the motion of the stone.
How long would it take to fall through the sun?
It would take
about two months
for the Earth to hit the Sun (and yes, you are right; it would go slowly at first and pick up speed as it continued to fall).
How long would it take to fall to the center of the Earth?
The acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s
2
and the radius of the Earth is 6.378 million meters. This means that you would fall through the entire Earth in only
42 minutes
! Can you imagine traveling 8 thousand miles in less than an hour? You maximum velocity at the center would be roughly 8km/s (18,000 mph).
What does Earth have that the moon doesn’t have?
The moon also preserves many of its ancient features: Unlike Earth, it doesn’t have
plate tectonics
to continually reface the landscape, nor does it have wind and rain wearing down ancient rocks. Generations of astronomers have studied this small airless world, from its pockmarked surface to its dense iron core.
Where is the deepest hole in the world?
As far as we know, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is the world’s deepest artificial hole drilled in the Earth. It is located
near the Russian border with Norway, on the Kola Peninsula
.
What would happen if we dug to the core?
Your ‘down’ trip would have gravity increasing your speed every second as you are pulled towards the core, propelling your way through Earth until you reached the center
. Once there, gravity would begin acting as a buffer against you, making your ‘up’ trip increasingly slower.
Can we drill to the mantle?
Around 10 km of drilling equipment will be needed to drill down and reach the Earth’s mantle
— a 3,000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock. Around 10 km of drilling equipment will be needed to drill down and reach the Earth’s mantle — a 3,000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock.
Do we age faster in space?
Scientists have recently observed for the first time that, on an epigenetic level,
astronauts age more slowly during long-term simulated space travel than they would have if their feet had been planted on Planet Earth.
How long does it take to get from Earth to the Moon?
It takes about
3 days
for a spacecraft to reach the Moon. During that time a spacecraft travels at least 240,000 miles (386,400 kilometers) which is the distance between Earth and the Moon. The specific distance depends on the specific path chosen.
How long would it take to travel 4 light years?
Last year, astronomers raised the possibility that our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, has several potentially habitable exoplanets that could fit the bill. Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years from Earth, a distance that would take about
6,300 years
to travel using current technology.
Why is Earth’s core still so hot?
There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: (1) heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; (2) frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the center of the planet; and (3) heat from the decay of radioactive elements.
How hot is the Centre of the Earth?
In new research, scientists studying what the conditions at the core should be like found that the center of the Earth is way hotter than we thought—around 1,800 degrees hotter, putting the temperature at a staggering
10,800 degrees Fahrenheit
.
How hot is the core of the Earth?
Temperature in the inner core is about
5,200° Celsius (9,392° Fahrenheit)
. The pressure is nearly 3.6 million atmosphere (atm). The temperature of the inner core is far above the melting point of iron. However, unlike the outer core, the inner core is not liquid or even molten.
What would happen if the Earth was cut in half?
As the Earth is methodically sliced in half,
its mantle and core would be exposed to the vacuum of space, causing massive earthquakes that would be felt everywhere on the planet
. At this point, the death toll would already be in the millions.
What is happening in the Earth’s core?
Today,
the inner core continues to grow at roughly 1mm in radius each year
, which equates to the solidification of 8,000 tonnes of molten iron every second. In billions of years, this cooling will eventually lead to the whole core becoming solid, leaving Earth without its protective magnetic field.
How do we know the Earth has a core?
After a quake, seismic waves travel through the Earth, changing their form and direction depending on the materials they pass through
. Geophysicists have used this information to deduce what lies at the Earth’s core.
