Journey to the Center
altitude
16,000 km
-270 °C
vacuum
Space
16,000 km up
The Blue Marble
Seven billion people, every ocean and every storm, on a sphere 12,742 km wide. City lights glitter along the night side. Scroll to fall toward it.
Scroll to descend ↓
100 km · 0 km
The Atmosphere
A shell of air thinner, relative to Earth, than the skin of an apple. You drop through the edge of space, into blue sky, and down through the cloud deck.
0 – 35 km
The Crust
Soil, then sedimentary rock laid down in ancient seas: sandstone, shale, limestone, fossils, and water-bearing aquifers. Below that, granite and columnar basalt. It gets about 25 °C hotter every kilometer.
35 – 2,890 km
The Mantle
Solid rock that flows like extremely slow honey, a few centimeters a year. Olivine-green peridotite gives way to glowing rock, and hot plumes rise from the deep to feed volcanoes like Hawaiʻi.
2,890 – 5,150 km
The Outer Core
An ocean of liquid iron and nickel, churning as it cools. That motion is a dynamo: it generates the magnetic field that shields Earth from the solar wind, traced here in blue.
5,150 – 6,371 km
The Inner Core
A ball of solid iron crystals the size of the Moon, about 5,400 °C, as hot as the surface of the Sun. It stays solid only because 3.6 million atmospheres of pressure keep it from melting.