What Do You Know About Mother Earth

This planet of ours has been existing for a very long time, and for precision about one-third the age of the universe. So do not think that the universe and earth are age mate because they are not. That said, what do you really know about the planet you are born into, build on, reproduce and die?

Earth is made up of vast oceans, fertile lands for farming, arid lands in the deserts, plains and gigantic mountains, fresh waters including streams, lake, and aquifers, as well as salt waters including oceans and seas. This beauty orbits round a star which gives it its warmth and energy that keeps us warm and gives us light.

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Now that I have talked about the earth being 1/3 of the universe's age, so how old is our mother earth? Our planet is about 4.6 billion years old, and it was created from the remnants of dead stars collected in a gas cloud that was dirty and became denser in the center forming an Accretion disk. These particles began to come together forming what we know today and it didn't just happen all of a sudden, it took about 10 to 20 million years for it to form. It is not like we know a lot about the 20 million years that it took the earth to form, that history is still as dusty as the gas it was formed from and we are yet to understand it fully.

While baby earth was still forming, it was not allowed to enjoy its infancy when a giant object as big as Mars collided with it causing materials from earth to be smashed out leading to the formation of the moon which is currently our biggest natural satellite in relation to our planet size. Earth at its infancy was continually hit by asteroid and this made the temperature of our planet to be high as it was extremely hot and the atmosphere was very toxic but these asteroids also came bearing gifts with one being water.

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Soon earth began to cool down and the water from underneath it began to come out but then they vaporized and became cloud. The size of earth's water is very small compared to the size of earth itself but still we still have more water on the its surface than land. Earth's surface is made up of 71% water and 29% land. You would imagine that with that amount of water on earth's surface, the majority of it should be drinkable and accessible to humans but this is not so. 97.5% of earth's water is salt water while 2.5% is fresh water. This 2.5% is now divided into 3 with 30% of it being underground water, 69% being ice and glacier, and 1% on the surface of the earth. The 1% is even divided into the atmosphere, the soil and swamps, rivers and even life itself having 0.3% of the 1% of the water.

While the earth has cooled down to form its crust, there are still hot rocks moving underneath the crust and breaking the crust apart from underneath the earth crust in a process known as plate tectonics. When these crust plates meet, they either bulge upwards to form mountains or the plunge downwards to form trenches like the Mariana trench. We have not been able to dig deep into the crust at all as we are still very far from digging deep into it and below the crust is the earth mantle which is made up of the upper and lower mantle. The mantle is about 2900KM thick after which we reach the earth's core made up of iron and nickel and it's temperature range from 4000 degrees Celsius to 6000 degrees Celsius.

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Back to where we stay, we breath in air and this air is made up of mostly Nitrogen at 78%, followed by oxygen at 21%, then other gasses like Argon at 0.9%, Carbon at 0.04% and the rest are other gasses including water vapor. We depend mainly on the Troposphere which is the lowest layer of the earth but above that is the Stratosphere where the Ozone layer exists to protect us from the radiation of the sun, then followed by the Mesosphere which is the coolest area on earth with a temperature of -85 degrees Celsius.

After the Mesosphere is the Thermosphere and above the Thermosphere is where space starts where the Ionosphere exist followed by the Exosphere where the International Space Station is stationed at and after this is outer space where there are no atmosphere. After all this said about our beautiful planet, it is important to know that humans have only lived for about 200 thousand years. So when next you are asked about your earth, I am sure you will be able to say something.

^REFERENCE

^{^{https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/ionosphere

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource

https://www.space.com/24854-how-old-is-earth.html

https://study.com/learn/lesson/accretion-theory-process.html

https://study.com/academy/lesson/formation-of-the-earth-theories.html

https://www.space.com/54-earth-history-composition-and-atmosphere.html

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/interesting-facts-about-moon

https://phys.org/news/2014-12-percent-earth.html

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/701

https://www.amnh.org/content/download/132762/2211960

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/plate-boundaries/

https://www.space.com/17777-what-is-earth-made-of.html

https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-quality/whats-in-the-air

https://www.nasa.gov/general/what-is-earths-atmosphere/

https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/ozone-layer

https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/atmosphere/layers-earths-atmosphere}}

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