My Question - Does the Earth grow in size has been something I have asked myself for sometime now.

The more you think of it the more your mind gets pulled between yes and no - so here goes.

Not only does the earth grow in size when meteors and other stelar objects settle on the surface but also increases in size because of the living elements too.

When we are born and grow we consume water and food that came from the earth so ok we are made up of or should i say from the earth (food and water) but we essentially came from nothing or am i wrong.

if you took everything we as animals and plants are made from and reduce it to the bare elements would the earth have the same, less or more makeup than it did 4 billion years ago when it was first created.

however if not then surely even without stelar rubbish (comits, rocks and ore) being dumped on us the earth would grow in size.

I say this becuase - when i die as the trillions of other animals and people before me after i have rotted and been reduced to nothing more than dust even microscopic amounts of dust this little contribution from me has surely given the planet a larger mass even slightly - not to mention all the other living creatures that have had a contribution.

anyway i know t prob sounds a bit baffling but im not sure it even sounds right in my head - let me know what u think.

Enivornmentists poise that the earth is shrinking and not increasing; the core is cooling.

Save the earth's core!

I think that though there are millions of tons or more of cosmic debris from meteors and comets and what not the earth finds a way to balance things out.

It's growing. Just look at how many more layers of earth there are above the time of the dinosaurs.

*Joins Snuffy's "save the Earth's core" protest just incase*

true, there are tons of layers of sedimentary rock. but where did those layers come from? erosion and deposition of other rock. rocks are by no means permanent, either. they are constantly subducted and recycled back into the system. so that's a no-growth enterprise.

Each day over 100 tons of space dust falls on Earth from meteors that are destroyed in the atmosphere. That might help

But at the same time the core is cooling. So maybe it is staying the same size The Earth contracted from a ring of dust and debris that orbited the Sun. After it became a certain size maybe the balance of space debris and 'core cooling contraction' (say that after a few cool ones) "evened out".......

Lapi'che

Problem solved

no......the earth's core may be cooling for now, but all the mass that accumlulates through cosmic dust and meteors, would only add to the mass. that should be sufficient to keep the core hot forever. the more mass, the more energy. this should also promote as strong magnetic field as well.

as to the theory in the first post goes: no way. what we are made of stays here as it always has, nothing gained or lost. conservation of energy.

Hi everyone, Im "Dr. Solar Wolff" and I'm new here. Normally, I would not pick such a strange topic with which to come aboard lest you think I am crazy but here goes.

Techtonic plate theory doesn't seem to explain it all. Earth is expanding at the cracks in the crust faster than it is subducting. This means the earth is getting larger. Look at a map of Pangea or Gwondaland (however they are spelled). One continent, everything joined up which slowly splits apart AS IF IT WERE EXPANDING.

There is a theory to account for this but a strange one until much thought is given. This is aether theory. According to this, earth, like every body of matter, is constantly absorbing fast moving energy. This is actually the same as gravity and gravity is a "push" according to this theory but obeys all the laws of Newton--but that's another story. As earth absorbs this aether energy, it breaks it and changes it into other radiation that we know such as x-rays, gamma rays, alpha, beta, heat, etc. But a portion of aether energy is stopped so suddenly that it changes to matter. This means earth, all the planets, all the stars, and everything else are expanding as is the entire Universe. It will expand until aether energy runs out.

References for this are by some obscure German writers, Cyril Davson and English engineer, and the best being a book by Dr. Hans Neiper, translated from German, dealing with gravity, free-energy devices, matter, medicine and other topics.

yes if u lok at dinosaur bones and the layers above them u do find out that th earth is growing.
and the universe is new and still expanding fron theBIG BANG so why not the earth.
the earth expands because it expands hen trees die we are made from attoms and so sutch why can things be made out of next to nothing i mean carbon dioxide is made out of oxygen whn we breath in we mae also oxygen thich trees take in and releese oxygen so it all goes round.
so when things die they make the worls grow.

Actually, as Frothydog has already pointed out, the layers of sedimentary rock above fossils are caused by the deposition of sediments by water or even wind. Sedimentary rock, where almost all fossils are found, is basically sand and gravel that has been compressed into solid rock over time. Therefore, while layers of rock form over the fossils, they are composed of sediment which has been taken away from elsewhere; The net weight of the Earth remains the same.



Carbon dioxide is not made out of oxygen; The molecular structure is entirely different. Also, we breathe in air, which contains oxygen and carbon dioxide, and breathe out the carbon dioxide. Trees and plants also 'breathe' in the air, only they use the carbon dioxide and expel the oxygen.

The relatively small amounts of dead and decomposing matter will have such a tiny effect on a mass as large as the earth so as not to even be noticeable. Even if the entire human race was suddenly killed and our bodies left to rot on the ground, it would have no cosmically signifigant change to the Earth's mass.

Remember that the Earth weighs somewhere around 5.972 sextillion (5,972,000,000,000,000,000,000) metric tons. That makes even the 100 daily tons of space dust seem pretty insignifigant.

400 million (metric?) tons of dust fall on earth from space every year, so yeah, definitely it is getting bigger. Just not really fast enough to notice.

there are some who believe that the earth's core is drawing material from the mantle as fuel which means that the earth may actually be shrinking not expanding.
There are others who believe that the great mountain ranges were pushed up by cataclysmic crust displacement, ie: folding caused by the crust collapsing onto the mantle.
others believe that this shrinkage is also a natural process and a process that all planets go thru until they end their lives.
If the planet is indeed shrinking as a result of cataclysmic crust displacemnt then we may have an answer as to why there have been regular mass extinctions, dramatic topographic folding and twisting (coal deposits 5 miles below the surface of the crust etc) dramatic changes in sea levels which could have been caused by water vapour being ejected from the mantle and crust by volcanic action created by tectonic plate collison.