This maybe a stupid question but i was asleep during much of my schooling so now i tring to catch up. So if there’s anyone who’d care to help :
What keeps the earths core so hot ? and with all the eruptions where is all the lava coming from ? I mean you’d figure it would cool off after awhile…And why isn’t the core going empty…???
There’s two reasons for the heat: First of all, radioactive decays in the core produce a good bit of heat, and secondly, most of it is just residual heat from when the Solar System formed. It takes a while to lose all of that heat.
As to why it doesn’t empty out, a minor quibble is that lava in erupting volcanoes, etc, doesn’t come all the way from the core, but only the crust or upper part of the mantle (think of an apple peal-- That’s about how thick the crust is relative to the rest of the Earth). With that said, the reason that the lower crust doesn’t hollow out is that even as lava well up, everything else settles down, so on the whole, everything stays about the same.
By the way, Moderator, there’s an extra copy of this thread, if you want to close the other.
Yeah, actually I’m going to close this one since it happened to be the one with fewer responses. Sorry about that.