Heat from Earth's formation still being pumped out | TG Daily

Heat from Earth's formation still being pumped out | TG Daily

Posted on Jul 18th 2011 by Emma Woollacott

Around half the 44 trillion watts of heat that flows from the interior of the Earth is the remaining heat from the planet's creation.

By capturing what have been called geoneutrinos – more precisely, geo-antineutrinos – emitted when radioactive isotopes decay - scientists at the KamLAND collaboration in Japan have precisely calculated the amount of heat generated by radioactive decay.

They've found that radioactive decay supplies only about half the Earth's heat, with the rest coming from primordial heat left over from the planet's formation.

The current most popular model of the inner Earth, known as bulk silicate Earth (BSE) assumes that all the heat from radioactive decay comes from the crust and mantle – about eight terawatts from uranium 238, another eight from thorium 232, and four from potassium 40.

KamLAND detected 841 candidate antineutrino events between March 2002 and November 2009, of which about 730 were reactor events or other background. The rest, though, were from radioactive decays of uranium and thorium in the Earth.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,