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Re:What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) by jethkl on Saturday April 30, 2022 @08:09AM (#31215410)
Why is the earth's crust so stable? It has supported life for billions of years, yet it is just 12 mi thick [1] and floats on top of liquid rock that extends for thousands of miles -- the part of earth we are most familiar with is a tiny fraction of what our planet really is. You could imagine that turbulence in the liquid below would cause currents that blast through the crust with catastrophic consequences, and that this would happen regularly. But it doesn't -- we have a small number of (super) volcanos, but they are pretty rare. I find this unnerving and remarkable. Our perception of reality -- in this case the earth beneath us -- is skewed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_Earth

Re:What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) by bell-cot on Saturday April 30, 2022 @08:28AM (#31215513)
"Liquid" does not describe the Earth's mantle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_Earth#Mantle It is more like cold pitch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
Re:What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) by jethkl on Saturday April 30, 2022 @11:57AM (#31216963)
Agree that "rock made weak and ductile under intense heat and pressure" would probably be better than "liquid", but common language and daily experience do not apply. Whatever the dynamic processes are doing, they must have symmetry and be stable -- hot plumes of stuff don't punch through the contents in random locations.
Re:What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) by adgjlsfhk1 on Saturday April 30, 2022 @08:25AM (#31215501)
something that is counter intuitive is that although the mantle is often described as liquid, that description is only valid on large scales (both space and time). for comparison, the mantle is significantly less liquid than cold asfault. it's just subject to huge pressures.
Re:What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) by MrYellowP on Saturday April 30, 2022 @09:51AM (#31216076)
> asfault

asphalt?

Re:What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) by qbonnard on Saturday April 30, 2022 @08:22AM (#31215490)
N. K. Jemisin wrote a triple Hugo winning trilogy[1] about what could happen to humanity with a sliiightly less stable crust, if you want some more unnerving ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._K._Jemisin#Broken_Earth_ser...

Re:What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) by deepsun on Saturday April 30, 2022 @11:39AM (#31216848)
Yet it's thankfully not that stable as is Venus's crust, otherwise we'd have much more carbon in atmosphere, so persistent hothouse effect and surface temperatures of 100+ Celsius.