center of the earth

A comment about being suspended or banned: I'm currently banned at Terry's TalkOrigins site over at MSN and have been for several years. He didn't like my aggressive discussion style, and so he banned me. But there's no hard feelings. Terry is welcome here, and I'd be glad to participate at his site again were he to let me back in.I'm also banned at one other site, probably now defunct. Back in early 1997 someone started up a Creationism discussion board at Yahoo. I joined and was the only other member. Me and the board's owner discussed things for a week or two, then he banned me. That left just him. Weird, huh! --Percy

The evidence for a hot inner earth has already been cited in this thread. The geologists here can do a better job recalling this evidence, but the evidence I can remember is:

1. Deep mines and drilling indicate increasing temperature with depth. I think we've gone down about 6 miles.
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2. In general, increasing pressure causes increasing temperature, and the pressure increases enormously with increasing depth within the earth.
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3. Seismic analysis of earthquakes reveals that some layers of the inner earth are liquid, and rock and metal must be very hot to be a liquid.
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4. Volcanos spew out magma from below the crust, and the magma is very hot.

The evidence for a hot inner earth and the evidence for evolution do not depend upon one another, though they are consistent with each other. And given the time it takes a body the size of a planet to cool, a cool inner earth would indicate greater age, not lesser.Another aspect to consider: if none of the traditional Creationist sources advocate a cool inner earth, then this is another clue for you and Cosmo that you're going down the wrong path.--Percy

Hi Simple,You're asking lots of good questions, which is exactly what you want to be doing. The answers seem to be spread across multiple posts instead of being contained in a single post, but I think all the information is there. Let me take a stab at getting many of the questions related to my post answered in one place.

1. How do we know that the outer core is liquid?
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   Through seismographic analysis. Seismographs around the world measure the arrival times of vibrations from every earthquake. Earthquake vibrations are transmitted through two types of waves, P and S (P for Primary or compression waves, and S for Secondary or Shear waves - there are also L or longitudinal waves that only move on the earth's surface). The details of these two types of waves aren't essential, though we can delve into it if you're interested, but the key point is that the waves are reflected and refracted as they travel through the earths interior, and S waves cannot travel through liquids. So when an earthquake occurs in Peru then seismographs around the world can record the time and intensity of the arriving waves, and subsequent analsis tells us the internal structure of the earth. In particular it tells is that there is an outer core of liquid.
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   If you click on this page 95 from Earth Story to see it full size you'll get a rough idea of the process, which is briefly described in the text at the lower right:
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   Click for larger image
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2. How do we know the liquid portion is hot?
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   First you have to accept as true some relatively simple physical principles. If you reject these principles then you'll not accept that the liquid portion is hot, but in that case you'll be rejecting much of science and we'd no longer be having a rational conversation.
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   If you keep a gas at a constant temperature, then compressing the gas will eventually turn it liquid. Compressing it further will turn it into a solid. In other words, increasing pressure causes materials to turn from the gaseous state to the liquid state and finally the solid state.
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   If you increase the temperature of a solid you'll eventually turn it to a liquid and then a gas.
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   Elements in a gravitational field sort themselves by density, with the most dense at the bottom of the gravitational field.
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   The deeper you go within the earth the greater the pressure, just as the deeper the dive in the ocean the greater the pressure.
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   If you accept the above, then you can arrive at the conclusion that the liquid must be hot through simple logical thinking: If we take a metal like iron and heat it to the melting point here on the earth's surface, that would correspond to a temperature 2800^oF. Now if we increase the pressure while keeping the temperature constant we can turn it back into a solid. Actual for-real laboratory experiments indicate that a nickel/iron core turns from a solid to a liquid at the pressures of the inner core at a temperature of 9000^oF.
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3. How do we know that the inner and outer core are composed of nickel/iron?
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   This is from page 100 of Earth Story:
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   The commonest type of meteorite, called a chondrite, is predominatnly composed of four elements - iron, oxygen, magnesium and silicon. Another common meteorite consists of an iron-nickel alloy. If the Earth has the same composition as a chondrite, but with most of the iron in the same metallic form as in the iron-nickel meteorites, then this would produce a planet with a similar density to the Earth's.
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   So your guess about gold at the core is a good one because gold is a very dense element. But the problem is that gold is a very rare element. While the inner and outer core must also consist of gold and uranium and lead and other dense elements, the relative abundance of these elements in the solar system compared to iron and nickel is so much less that their contribution isn't usually considered in laymen level presentations. I could find nowhere on the net where components other the nickel and iron in the core were mentioned.
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4. How do we know the interior of the earth is denser than the outer layers?
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   This is a simple to verify. If you check the article on the earth's core at Wikipedia you'll see that the average density of the earth (a derived value arrived at by dividing the earth's mass (an easily measured quantity) by it's volume (an easily calculated quantity since we know the radius)) is 5505 kg/m³, while the average density of material at the surface is only 3000 kg/m³, so the density of the material at greater depths must be much larger.
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5. How do we know the core is denser than the rest of the earth?
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   I was able to find little about direct measurements, but apparently there's something called a gravity measurement that indicates that the core is far denser than the mantle. Therefore, the mantle is denser than the rocks at the earth's surface, and the core is denser than the mantle. This makes sense since pressure, and therefore density, increases with depth.
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6. How do we know that water is not the liquid that makes up the outer core?
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   If you accept the above temperature and density estimates for the outer core, and if you understand the phase information presented by others for water, then you'll understand that it couldn't possibly be water, not at 9000^oF and a density above 6000 kg/m³.
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   Also, water is not dense enough to form a layer below rock. The densest materials sink beneath the less dense materials, and water is nowhere near as dense as rock.
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   Though the earth's magnetic field is not evidence against water, an aqueous outer core is incompatible with current theory since it couldn't contribute to this field.

Help this helps! Others here are also giving you very good information, so I hope you listen to them, too. I agree with what someone posted about this thread beginning to appear repetitive.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 02-06-2005 15:47 AM

This is a science thread. You have no evidence that the earth was created by divine fiat. The only evidence we have is that the earth was created as the result of natural forces and processes. The formation of the earth has nothing to do with the Big Bang. Gold is a rare element in the solar system as measured by the composition of meteorites, while iron and nickel is plentiful. Hence, these elements, being very dense, are assumed to predominate in the core, and it is consistent with our calculations based upon measurements and observations of conditions inside the earth. Like all scientific theories, this view is tentative, but unlike your proposals it is supported by evidence. You've said this several times, and as others have pointed out, this is incorrect. You've somehow picked up a misimpression. The phase diagram of water indicates that water in liquid form could not possibly exist at 9000^oF at the inner core. There's no evidence that the inner core is water. The seismic information is all wrong for water, and it's inconsistent with other data. There is no need to postulate an impermeable layer of rock to keep in the water that we have no evidence for, and no evidence for the impermeable layer anyway.Almost all the interior of the earth is inaccessible to direct observation, and so there is much that we don't know. But science proceeds by making measurements and observations. The speculations you're advancing are not supported by any evidence. Many of these speculations can be ruled out from current evidence, but many cannot. But in the world of science the lack of evidence means the views are speculation only, and religiously motivated speculation at that.In a simplistic way, science means having real world reasons for what you believe. If you want to believe the earth is young and the flood was real that is your privilege, but it isn't science. If you want your view to eventually predominate and become the accepted view, then you must replace your speculations with evidence.--Percy

I'm going to go off in a sort of rhetorical direction. This isn't addressed to you, but the work you did on the hydrogen proposal brings this issue to mind.What's the point of these exercises if we're going to allow evidence-free flights of fancy? If when a violation of known physical laws is encountered the WB advocates can simply invoke a miracle, then we're not doing science anymore. The WB advocates seem to be sort of roughly following a rule of "violate as few known physical laws as possible, and violate them in as minimal a way as possible."But the mind just boggles at the number of fictions piled upon fictions. Not only is there no evidence for God, there's not even any evidence for the way he works his miracles. Does he really care how many physical laws he violates when he performs a miracle? There's no evidence about this in any way. Does he care whether he violates a physical law a lot or a little? There's no evidence about this, either.But it gets worse. There's no evidence for a young earth, no evidence for a flood, no evidence for an aqueous inner core, no evidence for a cool core, but we're all patiently addressing all these absurdities, and then comes the most ridiculous proposal of all: it was hydrogen! When does it stop?Those that have been here a while know that I prefer that EvC Forum not host what I call nonsense discussions. I see no problem with answering some interesting hypotheticals, and this thread has at some points been doing just that, but my perception of this thread now is of a couple high school kids with no conscience wasting a lot of people's time raising spurious issues that have no basis in any evidence, and who aren't really interested in considering the issues from a scientific perspective. And that's okay. But not here.Unless this thread veers away from considering scenarios with no basis in fact, I'm going to let the 300 message barrier be the limit. With the Christmas software release the 300 message limit no longer has any technical reason for enforcement (more than 300 messages placed a strain on the old software), but the moderators find it a very convenient "taking stock of things" point.--Percy

Hi Simple,The objection you quoted was this: This objection is referring to the combination of hydrogen with oxygen to form water plus heat. It is not referring to the production of hydrogen and oxygen from water through electrolysis.If you have the transformer (power supply) from a model train or electric car set, you can perform electrolysis yourself. In a deep bowl of salty water turn two beakers upside down. Make sure they're filled with water. Take the two wires from your transformer and connect the negative to a strip of copper, and the positive to a strip of zinc. Place the copper strip under one beaker and the zinc strip under the other. Turn the transformer on.Bubbles will form on the zinc and copper strips, and over time gas will collect and fill the beakers, forcing the water out. Hydrogen gas collects in the copper beaker, and oxygen in the zinc beaker.Light a match, carefully lift the oxygen beaker up from the salt bath, slip the match under the beaker and watch it flare brightly, then burn out.Now light another match, carefully lift the hydrogen beaker, slip the match under the beaker, and you'll get a small explosion as the hydrogen combines with oxygen in the air to form water.Multiply the explosion 10 zilliony zilliony times to recreate your scenario of hydrogen escaping from the deep to react with the oxygen in the air and form water. The surface of the earth would be incinerated, including all life.Of course, God could perform a miracle to allow the hydrogren to react with the water without exploding. In fact, God could have done it in innumerable other ways through any number of miraculous approaches. Just as he once said, "Let there be light," he could as easily have said, "Let there be water." If you're going to invoke miracles, does it really matter which particular miracles you invoke? What leads you to believe that the water that fell from the sky and erupted from the deep pre-existed the flood? God could have created it as he needed it, and he could have made it disappear as easily while the flood was receding. Since you're willing to consider proposals that have no evidence, all things are possible to you. Why gold or diamond at the center of the earth? Why not manna from heaven? Why an acqueous outer core, why not heavenly clouds upon which angels strum their harps? Once you've abandoned evidence and reason, you may as well go all the way!--Percy

Actually, your disadvantage is worse than that. Let me explain.Creationism claims it is genuine science every bit as valid as evolution, and further that it should be represented in school curiculums alongside evolution. EvC Forum was created to explore these claims.Once you cite God on the side of Creationism, you automatically contradict the claim that Creationism is science. Imagine going before one of the state school boards of education that have been in the news recently, such as Ohio and Kansas, and claiming that geophysicists are wrong about the earth's interior because God needed a reservoir of water from which to produce the flood. Your fellow Creationists would immediately disown you, because they've been working hard to show that Creationism stands independent of God and evangelical Christianity.Claims that God should be included as a possibility in scientific endeavors are not ruled out at EvC Forum, but they're usually discussed in either the [forum=-11] or [forum=-6] forums.--Percy

If you really believe this, then I suggest you take this up in a thread in the [forum=-11] forum. As someone else said, not if this thread is any indication. Your approach so far has been, "Is there any evidence that the core isn't water? How about gold? How about diamond? How about hyrdrogren? How about a fine cabernet?" For you it seems science is a game of 20 questions. And I'm sure all here would agree. But what evidence is causing you to question current scientific views of the earth's inner structure?--Percy