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Discussion » Questions » Science and Technology » What do you think will happen to our planet when it cools off? No more magma.
Element 99

What do you think will happen to our planet when it cools off? No more magma.

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Posted - August 31, 2017
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Responses


  • 13071


     

    The answer is that the earth's core will never be solid. And I do mean NEVER. Now, that being said, there is only one way it could ever happen and that is if the earth happened to get thrown out of its orbit to become a nomad planet. Then it might have time for its core to cool.

    The reason I say this is because it will take longer for the earth's core to turn solid than it will take for the sun to run out of nuclear fuel and expand to engulf the earth. At that point, the earth will be vaporized as it spirals out of its orbit into the sun. The core would soon turn into incandescent gas. This will occur something like 4 to 5 billion years from now.

    But don't worry, it won't happen, as I said.

      August 31, 2017 7:44 PM MDT
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  • 16763
    As the sun expands,  it's density decreases - and is losing mass all the time, so it's gravitational attraction decreases. The earth may not be engulfed after all, it may just slingshot off and become a nomad planet. It will be scorched to a cinder long before that, though, the sun will have engulfed Venus before it has lost sufficient mass to be in danger of losing its grip on Earth.
      August 31, 2017 8:24 PM MDT
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  • 44604
    Never is a LONG time.
      September 1, 2017 6:59 AM MDT
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  • 13071
    You are correct Element 99. Anything could happen in the meantime. We could experience a Sun burp and life on earth could be incinerated in the blink of an eye. Nothing is 100 percent.
      September 1, 2017 7:21 AM MDT
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  • 16763
    It won't, carbonproduct explained why. Hypothetically, however, a cooled Earth would see a Martian scenario - loss of magnetic field, leaving the atmosphere to be stripped away by the solar wind. The oceans, unprotected by atmosphere, would boil away. Life would cease to exist.
      August 31, 2017 8:27 PM MDT
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  • 3719
    An intriguing question, but I doubt people will be around to see it. Animal genii and species tend to have life-spans short in geological terms (only a few million years) so even if some new form of hominid is still around, we humans will probably have vanished long before then. 

    The Earth is not cooling by simple radiation of heat - as was originally thought when geologists and physicists first tried to calculate its age by the laws of conduction and black-body radiation - because its heat source is the radioactive decay of Uranium and daughter elements within the planet's interior.

    Whether that is likely to end before the Sun dies, I do not know, but there is no need for us to worry about it!

    If the Earth does lose its internal heating, Continental Drift would come to a stop as that is probably driven by convection currents within the molten (though extremely viscous) Mantle. There would be no volcanism, as the question implies, also as a result. 
      September 2, 2017 5:44 PM MDT
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