• Question: does the world get bigger, smaller or stay the same size over years ? ;)

    Asked by harryogorman15 to Angela, Gabriele, Karen, Maria, Shane on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Karen McCarthy

      Karen McCarthy answered on 12 Nov 2013:


      Hi Harry, this idea of the world getting bigger was actually first though of back in Darwins day! It was thought that because of gas buildup and expansion of its magma core, the world would slowly get larger, but unfortunately this was proved wrong by a NASA study a few years ago – its a small world after all!

    • Photo: Shane Mc Guinness

      Shane Mc Guinness answered on 12 Nov 2013:


      I suppose in a very tiny way the earth has been slowly growing ever since it was born! Every this big has enough gravity to pull things close to it. So all the material that we have in and around our planet is slowly growing as we suck in things like meteorites which slowly add to the mass of our planet. These amounts are really tiny though so it would be impossible. I’d say if you add up all the stuff that’s hit our planet since we started sending stuff up (satellites, rockets….) it would probably equal all the stuff that we’ve gathered up from space since then! Did you know we recently managed to send something out of our solar system for the first time!? The Voyager 1 spacecraft that we sent into space in 1977 has just this year left our solar system! We’ve sent material out into space never to return again (probably)

    • Photo: Angela Stevenson

      Angela Stevenson answered on 13 Nov 2013:


      According to some our planet is still growing! Every island and seamount, and most of the water in today’s oceans have evolved in the very short period of 200 million years! Think of the Hawaiian islands, they are young islands that are formed by volcanoes, magma rising to the surface to create this chain of islands and they are still growing. With this, the Earth still is steadily growing in size and expanding in diameter but at a very very slow rate. Hope that helps!

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