What does the earth look like if you cut it in half?

What does the earth look like if you cut it in half?

The Earth is made of four main layers:

• The crust - around 30km thick and is the uppermost layer
• The mantle - the layer directly below the crust and is around 2900km thick
• The outer core - a layer around 2250km thick
• The inner core - the innermost layer, 1220km thick.

The crust is made up of the familiar rocks; e.g. granite, sandstone, basalt and gneiss. The crust is actually made up of two layers, the lithosphere and the crust itself. Crust can be one of two type; continental or oceanic. The mantle is made of an ultrabasic rock called periodotite and is split into many layers, one of which is the asthenosphere, directly below the lithosphere. The outer core is composed of liquid iron. The inner core is made of solid iron.

There is a lot more detail to this simple picture, such as transition zones, the upper/lower mantle divide and some doubt on composition of the minor elements in the core, but this is the basic picture. The drawing below shows all these layers.

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