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The orbital speed of Earth averages about 29.78 km/s (107,200 km/h; 66,600 mph), which is fast enough to travel a distance equal to Earth's diameter, about 12,742 km (7,918 mi), in seven minutes, and the distance from Earth to the Moon, 384,400 km (238,900 mi), in about 3.5 hours.
The geothermal heat flow from the Earth's interior is estimated to be 47 terawatts (TW) [12] and split approximately equally between radiogenic heat and heat left over from the Earth's formation. This corresponds to an average flux of 0.087 W/m 2 and represents only 0.027% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, being dwarfed by the 173 ...
The Earth's weather is a consequence of its illumination by the Sun and the laws of thermodynamics. The atmospheric circulation can be viewed as a heat engine driven by the Sun's energy and whose energy sink, ultimately, is the blackness of space. The work produced by that engine causes the motion of the masses of air, and in that process it ...
The polar wind or plasma fountain is a permanent outflow of plasma from the polar regions of Earth's magnetosphere. [2]: 29 Conceptually similar to the solar wind, it is one of several mechanisms for the outflow of ionized particles. Ions accelerated by a polarization electric field known as an ambipolar electric field is believed to be the ...
Regardless of the time of day (i.e. Earth's rotation on its axis), the North Pole will be dark, and the South Pole will be illuminated; see also arctic winter. Figure 3 shows the angle of sunlight striking Earth in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres when Earth's northern axis is tilted away from the Sun, when it is winter in the north and ...
The planet Earth has a rather slight equatorial bulge; its equatorial diameter is about 43 km (27 mi) greater than its polar diameter, with a difference of about 1 ⁄ 298 of the equatorial diameter. If Earth were scaled down to a globe with an equatorial diameter of 1 metre (3.3 ft), that difference would be only 3 mm (0.12 in).
British explorer Sir James Clark Ross discovered the magnetic north pole in 1831 in northern Canada, approximately 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) south of the true North Pole.
The five components of the climate system all interact. They are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. [1]: 1451 Earth's climate system is a complex system with five interacting components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth's upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things).