[blueunicorn6]

I still don’t understand why there is so much lava. This dirt thermos we call earth must have some tremendous insulation qualities to keep that rock liquid for billions of years. My coffee cools off in the thermos in a few hours.

[DB]

Gravity (extreme compression) and radio activity.

[chuckles]

There is several reasons we have lava. The pressures remain great deep in the earth. Go to the pressure/temp scales in the refrigeration industry for more info on the relationship of temp to pressure. The other is movement. The earths core is still molten and moving. Movement causes heat. As the crust moves as it just did in Japan, we will have more heat buildup. not less. If the earths core ever turns solid, we will freeze very quickly.

If you drill down a few hundred feet, you most likely could run a water cooled coil down there to cool your home geothermically. Just as a root cellar stays cool you could extract the cooler temps and bring them in your house. Same thing with a deep pond on your property with a coil at the bottom of the pond.

Now drill down deeper and you will at some point start to get hotter as the geothermic heat will become more evident. Remember the Peruvian copper miners trapped underground a mile. They were hot even in winter.

[Colinsky]

This dirt thermos we call earth must have some tremendous insulation qualities to keep that rock liquid for billions of years. My coffee cools off in the thermos in a few hours.

The Earth's core has trillions of tons of radioactive elements that generate heat as they decay.