67% of the Earth’s mass is comprised of silicates in the mantle. Solid silicates have very low thermal coefficients of expansion, meaning they change volume very little in comparison to other compounds. So if the mantle was cooled and solidified to 0, then heated to 50, it’d have very little effect. It’d grow something like 0.02% in volume.
Being that the mantle is generally liquid, you’ll see a much larger effect from the initial cooling. But how much? I don’t know. Liquid rock isn’t present in mere mortal online calculators and my ability to dive into the material properties and manually calculate it is long gone from my head.
But “much” larger may not be significant to the human experience, given that 0.02% would be imperceptible as a baseline. If you had a 1km long solid silicon ruler, heating it from 0 to 50C would make it just (edit) 0.2m longer. A circumferential ruler reaching around the Earth along the equator would go from ~40,000km to 40,008km.
Edit: corrected 20m to 0.2m. Flubbed the percentage in the calculator as 0.02 (2%) instead of 0.0002 (0.02%). So really, really imperceptible to a human walking 1km
67% of the Earth’s mass is comprised of silicates in the mantle. Solid silicates have very low thermal coefficients of expansion, meaning they change volume very little in comparison to other compounds. So if the mantle was cooled and solidified to 0, then heated to 50, it’d have very little effect. It’d grow something like 0.02% in volume.
Being that the mantle is generally liquid, you’ll see a much larger effect from the initial cooling. But how much? I don’t know. Liquid rock isn’t present in mere mortal online calculators and my ability to dive into the material properties and manually calculate it is long gone from my head.
But “much” larger may not be significant to the human experience, given that 0.02% would be imperceptible as a baseline. If you had a 1km long solid silicon ruler, heating it from 0 to 50C would make it just (edit) 0.2m longer. A circumferential ruler reaching around the Earth along the equator would go from ~40,000km to 40,008km.
Edit: corrected 20m to 0.2m. Flubbed the percentage in the calculator as 0.02 (2%) instead of 0.0002 (0.02%). So really, really imperceptible to a human walking 1km