Before we begin to explore the earth’s layers from core to atmosphere and the materials that it is composed of, we will need to look at the earth’s early stages of formation. Included in this is will be; what materials the earth is comprised of, as well as; how they arrived on the earth, and the resulting heat energy that is inherent within our earth.
When the earth was still in its early stages of formation it was slowly accumulating mass from particles within the planetary rings that were attracted by the earth’s gravitational pull. These particles were metallic chunks; similar to iron meteorites, rocky chunks; similar to stony meteorites, and icy-gaseous chunks; similar to comets. As these particles collided with the earth it created stored heat energy through kinetic energy, we call this impact energy. With every impact the earth’s mass increased and the gravitational pull became stronger contracting in on itself which added more heat energy that we refer to as gravitational energy. Radioactive energy, or radioactivity, is when an unstable particle collides with the earth and break down to something stable and gives off heat energy. These three types of heat energy are inherent to the earth’s composition and are key when looking at the various layers that make up our earth. With all the inherent heat energy that the earth has, it causes the various materials that collide with earth to heat up as they are pulled toward the center of earth’s mass. This causes the various materials to separate and enables them to flow further toward or away from the earth’s center according to their density. Once the various materials are flowing, they begin to layer according to their density. The more dense the materials, the closer to the center of the earth it will be while the less dense materials filter their way to the upper layers of the earth as they cool