Question
How hot is the center of the Earth?

How hot is the center of the Earth?

Last updated: August 10, 2024

I really like Jules Verne’s take on the center of the Earth. In his 1864 novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth, explorers find all kinds of things many miles down inside the planet, including dinosaurs, giants, and full-on oceans. 

In real life, you’d probably just be digging through the Earth’s mantle before you could live to see any real progress, considering that layer alone is over 1,800 miles deep. 

As most scientists seem to agree that ever getting to the literal center of the Earth would be technically impossible, let alone survivable for a human, I guess we can just keep making things up for ourselves. But science does have a pretty good idea about what the Earth’s core is like, even if they’ve never been there. One thing we’re sure of is that it’s quite hot down there — just how hot is it?

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The answer is: 9,000°. While the temperature can technically fluctuate a bit, the inner core of Earth tends to run at about 9,000°F. One oddity is that this is way hotter than needed to melt iron, yet because of all the pressure inside the core the iron atoms are able to turn into liquid, so scientists refer to it as a kind of plasma. Weird.Source

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