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A physicist's journey to the centre of the Earth

It is a paradox that, despite it being the planet on which all our experience is founded, the bulk Earth is as inaccessible as a remote galaxy. In South African diamond mines, man has penetrated about 3 km into the solid Earth; intact core from boreholes has been recovered from about 7 km and, in the Kola Peninsula of northern Russia, drill chippings have been sluiced up from about 13 km. Nevertheless, even if we had the resources to pepper the outer layer with exploratory boreholes, direct observation of the remaining 99% of the Earth's volume will always remain an impossibility. And yet we know some quite detailed properties of the interior of the Earth. Contrary to primitive cosmologies inspired by watching volcanoes erupt, and although below 2890 km there is a core of molten steel, we know that only in rare, shallow and isolated pockets are the rocks of the Earth's interior molten. The interior of the Earth is like an onion-skin: properties (density, electrical conductivity, sound speed etc) change mainly with depth. Taking the Earth's response to stress as one example, the material behaves like a brittle elastic solid only to depths of about 10-20 km. Below that, Earth materials exhibit the properties of both a solid and a liquid: to short-period effects like sound waves, they respond as a conventional solid but, when subjected to long-period stress, they can also flow like a liquid with a very high viscosity. Viscosity is initially controlled by the increasing mobility of atoms as temperature increases (viscosity decreases from about 1025 Pa s in the upper 20 km to about 1020 Pa s at a depth of 250 km); but atomic mobility is then offset by the counteracting effects of increasing pressure (viscosity increases to perhaps 1023 Pa s at 2500 km). We also have a quantitative physical picture of Earth behaviour stretching back over 4.5 billion years, despite having only 4500 years of recorded scientific observations about the Earth. Using the same physics that designed the platework of ships and bridges, we see the upper elastic layer of the Earth bending under the loads applied by mountains and ice sheets: about 11 000 years ago, a 2 km load of ice melted, and Scandinavia and northern Canada are still springing back into shape at about 10 mm per year. About 100 million years ago, the plate supporting North America and Europe fractured, and we can measure their continuing separation with lasers and microwaves at a few cm per year. We are now just able to make acoustic images of turbulent plumes churning up the Earth's deep interior as heat from radioactive decay is converted into the motion of convective overturn: the Earth is a heat engine! So how is all this `knowledge' possible when there are absolutely no direct observations of the interior of the Earth or its remote past? Over the course of the last few centuries, careful laboratory observations have identified patterns in the way natural materials behave which we now codify as the laws of physics. They enable us to construct a model of how materials would behave under more exotic conditions and at past and future times. As one example, we measure the rate at which radioactive atoms decay and identify that the half-life of a particular species is a `constant of nature', that is, we have so far found no ambient conditions that cause it to vary. With this experience, we measure radioactive isotopes in a rock to find the proportion of parent atoms remaining to the daughter atoms produced by its decay. Knowing the half-life makes the rock a natural clock with which to date an event in the remote past. In the special feature on Geophysics in this issue, we have picked just a few examples to show how basic physics - gravity, electricity, magnetism and sound - can be harnessed to investigate what we can never observe directly. `Antarctic seismology' is an example of the Earth being doubly remote: its surface as well as its interior are inaccessible. Here, practical fieldwork extending to distant parts of the globe must be combined with international collaboration. ` `Little g' revisited' illustrates how a global picture of the Earth's gravity field is being created by supplementing such ground-based measurements with remote-sensing from satellites. Satellites now form the main source of information about `The Earth's main magnetic field', the consequence of a vast dynamo within the molten iron core. For such global problems of the deep interior, the impossibility of making direct observations is absolute but cost can often be an equally strict limitation for much geophysical work. While we could in principle look for oil reservoirs or shallow regions where poison has contaminated the ground by digging it all up or drilling, this would be economically prohibitive. `Investigating brownfield sites with electrical resistivity' illustrates that, for the geophysicist, investigating the Earth's core and mapping subsurface chemical pollutants are aspects of the same problem - using basic physics to find out about the Earth's inaccessible interior. Editor's note. In this bumper issue of Physics Education we also have a trio of articles about absolutely nothing, showing that there is more to nothing than might be apparent to the casual eye!