• Question: will the world ever grow

    Asked by chloe1998 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi cloe1998,

      What a fantastic question, I’ve often wondered about this myself! I’m not a physicist (my work looks at what the brain can do), so I don’t know much about this topic at all, but I have some thoughts. I’m going to assume by the ‘world’ you mean the ‘Earth’ – but let me know if I am wrong.
      If you think about it in simple terms the Earth should be increasing in matter (stuff) since it is always being hit by space dust and meteorites. Although we remove matter from the Earth we don’t destroy it, we only move it around. Burning oil for example results in gases that still make-up the matter of the Earth. So my guess is that the Earth is growing but only very slightly making it completely unnoticeable.

      I hope that answered your question.

    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi @chloe1998
      I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to this, but I don’t think it ever could. The earth is not alive, so the only way it could grow would be by something else merging with it. Bits of rock from space do hit the earth and join with it occasionally, but they’re so small they don’t really make any difference to the size of the earth.

      I don’t know whether this is 100% correct, but that’s my guess, hope that’s OK 🙂

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I reckon Tim and Suzi are both about right! The Earth is probably growing at such a tiny rate that it’s completely unnoticeable.

      Sometimes, cool noticeable stuff does happen, but only very rarely, usually when there’s been a huge earthquake or volcano eruption! I don’t know whether you remember the tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004, but I think that was caused by an undersea earthquake – and, when that happened, the ocean floor suddenly rose up a few metres – that was what pushed all the water along to make the tsunami. So I suppose, in a way, that’s like the earth growing a little bit! Volcanoes have also created land – there’s an island near Iceland called Surtsey that was created by an underwater eruption in the 1960s, so this island appeared in the middle of the sea on 14 November 1963 and it’s still there. If you think about it, all the stuff that created that land came from inside the planet to start with, so the planet hasn’t gained any weight, but its surface area has got bigger! Here’s a website about Surtsey:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surtsey

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