Empirical Earth · Test It Yourself

What is under the disc? — the model answers, and the answer is a fluid

The claim

“The flat Earth rests on a layer of molten lava, which is where volcanoes come from. The disc is held up by world-bearing elephants standing on a cosmic turtle.”

What is true

The diagram is right that there is a hot, molten interior, and that is a real insight.

What is measured

The diagram is correct that the interior is hot and molten, and it deserves credit for saying so. But it has drawn a disc floating on a liquid. A liquid under its own gravity has one stable shape, and it is not a disc. The elephants are not decoration. They are a structural requirement that the diagram’s own physics forced on it, and the turtle is what happens when you ask the same question one more time.

What would show this is wrong

a mechanism by which a body of rock the size of the Earth, resting on molten rock, holds a flat shape against its own gravity, without invoking anything that itself needs holding up. Or a source for 47 terawatts of continuous heat flow that does not require a hot interior at all.

Sources

  1. Earth’s internal heat budget. Heat flows from the Earth’s interior to the surface at an estimated 47 ± 2 terawatts , from two sources in roughly equal amounts: radiogenic heat from the decay link
  2. The geothermal gradient, and the mantle as a fluid. Away from plate boundaries the temperature rises about 25 °C per kilometer of depth through the crust. Partially molten rock at 650 to 1,2 link
  3. Fennoscandia is still rising, and GPS is watching. Northern Scandinavia lay under 2 to 3 km of ice at the last glacial maximum; the ice melted between roughly 21,000 and 8,000 years ago. The link
The full entry, with the working →

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