Scale & Composition of Earth’s surface: Major constituents of the crust, water and atmosphere

You may have seen a water version or two like this, me too, but I figured why stop there? Let’s take a look at Earth’s surface, the layer upon which every living thing has ever lived.

This animation was made in collaboration with Dr. Christine Houser, a specially appointed assistant Professor of solid Earth geophysics at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Japan. Dr. Christine strongly insisted the colour of the mantle be accurately green, representing mostly olivine. We discussed blackbody radiation of the hot rock and whether or not it would glow red: it wouldn’t. The uppermost mantle is too cool, and radiative transfer of heat (which dominates in that layer) is not efficient.

You may be surprised that Silicon dioxide has a similar size to the entire crust+water sphere. That’s just an illustration of the fact the volume increases as the cube of radius. In fact, if you make the radius of a sphere just 26% larger the volume doubles! It’s also why the Earth looks relatively a similar size. This isn’t just a learning experience about Earth, but one of geometry.

Data: The Earth’s crust total mass is from Peterson & Depaulo’s (2007) Crust2.0 model results (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/200...), and this was added to the total mass of all water from e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/wa.... Compositional breakdown by mass % for the crust was found via Rudnick and Gao (2003) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/b0-08-04375...). Spheres shown factor in each compound’s density at 1 atmosphere of pressure, e.g. water is 1kg/m3 while SiO2 is 2.65kg/m3. Earth’s atmosphere was condensed into a sphere whose density is 0.9kg/m3 (above that of liquid nitrogen). Earth’s total mass is 5.97e24 kg, the crust is 2.77e22 kg.

Credits: Dr. Christine Houser. Earth imagery: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Geophysical Data Center, 2006, 2-minute Gridded Global Relief Data (ETOPO2v2) - http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/fliers/0... The Blue Marble Next Generation data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC) and NASA's Earth Observatory. Notes: the above were in a 2-D form, and I made them into a rotating sphere, and I made the Earth mantle map textures. Made in/with Adobe After effects, Premiere Pro, Google sheets.

I am also working on a mantle/core deconstruction video, but this animation was time consuming and I wanted to gauge interest in that by posting this first (important) part.