A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [106]
Interestingly, even though the hole was modest, nearly everything about it was surprising. Seismic wave studies had led the scientists to predict, and pretty confidently, that they would encounter sedimentary rock to a depth of 4,700 meters, followed by granite for the next 2,300 meters and basalt from there on down. In the event, the sedimentary layer was 50 percent deeper than expected and the basaltic layer was never found at all. Moreover, the world down there was far warmer than anyone had expected, with a temperature at 10,000 meters of 180 degrees centigrade, nearly twice the forecasted level. Most surprising of all was that the rock at that depth was saturated with water—something that had not been thought possible.
Because we can't see into the Earth, we have to use other techniques, which mostly involve reading waves as they travel through the interior. We also know a little bit about the mantle from what are known as kimberlite pipes, where diamonds are formed. What happens is that deep in the Earth there is an explosion that fires, in effect, a cannonball of magma to the surface at supersonic speeds. It is a totally random event. A kimberlite pipe could explode in your backyard as you read this. Because they come up from such depths—up to 120 miles down—kimberlite pipes bring up all kinds of things not normally found on or near the surface: a rock called peridotite, crystals of olivine, and—just occasionally, in about one pipe in a hundred—diamonds. Lots of carbon comes up with kimberlite ejecta, but most is vaporized or turns to graphite. Only occasionally does a hunk of it shoot up at just the right speed and cool down with the necessary swiftness to become a diamond. It was such a pipe that made Johannesburg the most productive diamond mining city in the world, but there may be others even bigger that we don't know about. Geologists know that somewhere in the vicinity of northeastern Indiana there is evidence of a pipe or group of pipes that may be truly colossal. Diamonds up to twenty carats or more have been found at scattered sites throughout the region. But no one has ever found the source. As John McPhee notes, it may be buried under glacially deposited soil, like the Manson crater in Iowa, or under the Great Lakes.
So how much do we know about what's inside the Earth? Very little. Scientists are generally agreed that the world beneath us is composed of four layers—rocky outer crust, a mantle of hot, viscous rock, a liquid outer core, and a solid inner core.*28 We know that the surface is dominated by silicates, which are relatively light and not heavy enough to account for the planet's overall density. Therefore there must be heavier stuff inside. We know that to generate our magnetic field somewhere in the interior there must be a concentrated belt of metallic elements in a liquid state. That much is universally agreed upon. Almost everything beyond that—how the layers interact, what causes them to behave in the way they do, what they will do at any time in the future—is a matter of at least some uncertainty, and generally quite a lot of uncertainty.
Even the one part of it we can see, the crust, is a matter of some fairly strident debate. Nearly all geology texts tell you that continental crust is three to six miles thick under the oceans, about twenty-five miles thick under the continents, and forty to sixty miles thick under big mountain chains, but there are many puzzling variabilities within these generalizations. The crust beneath the Sierra Nevada Mountains, for instance, is only about nineteen to twenty-five miles thick, and no one knows why. By all the laws of geophysics the Sierra Nevadas should be sinking, as if into quicksand. (Some people think they may be.)
How and when the Earth got its crust are questions that divide geologists into two broad camps—those who think it happened abruptly early in the Earth's history and those who think it happened gradually and rather later. Strength of feeling runs deep on such matters. Richard Armstrong of Yale proposed