What Happens If You Fall Through The Center Of The Earth?

You’re strolling along on a hot summer's 

day, taking in the sights and not looking where you’re going when OOOPPs! 

You’ve fallen… and you keep falling! Holy Moly! You’re falling 

through the center of the Earth! What will happen to you? Will you pop 

out the other side, and bounce back, will gravity leave you stuck in the center, will 

you burst into flames? We’re about to find out! I’m Stu, this is Debunked, and we’re 

here to sort the truths from the myths, and the facts from the misconceptions. Though it is a fairly common media trope, 

it’s pretty obvious to most people that the idea of digging a hole through the Earth, often 

ending up in China, is a fanciful one indeed. The deepest hole ever drilled by 

man is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which you can find out more about 

here, and despite its impressive depth it still only got 0.3 percent of 

the way to the Earth’s core. Sad to say, a true through-the-Earth tunnel is little more 

than a pipe-dream, pun very much intended. Imagine for a moment, however, that 

such a feat were indeed possible… imagine we did possess the technological 

capabilities to build a nice, stable tunnel straight through the planet… what exactly 

would happen if you were to jump into the hole? It should go without saying that the 

creation of a solid and sturdy tunnel through the planet is ludicrously 

unfeasible for a number of reasons. Even if we didn’t have to worry about 

trifling concerns like cost and where exactly we’re going to put all the truly 

preposterous amounts of displaced earth, our planet is not a solid lump of matter through 

which one can simply bore a hole. The Earth has a number of internal layers that vary in 

density, ranging from solid to frankly gooey, that do not behave in a single, uniform manner. 

These internal dynamics make the construction of a simple 12,742 kilometer (or 7917 mile) long 

tunnel going from one side of the planet to the other even more profoundly impossible than 

it already is.So, with the mere possibility of creating such a hole already built on a variety 

of wild assumptions, what exactly would happen to a person crazy-enough to jump into one of 

these hypothetical planet-piercing tunnels? Well, without wanting to be too much of a 

buzzkill right out of the gate… they’d die. Yep, sorry. They’re a goner for sure, 

for numerous fascinating reasons. The first reason is the simple matter 

of heat. Work on the aforementioned Kola Superdeep Borehole stopped in 1989 

due to unexpectedly high temperatures of up to 180 degrees celsius (or 356 degrees 

fahrenheit), and that’s only 12 kilometers down. So unless you were wearing a very sophisticated 

and futuristic heat-resistant protective suit, you’d already have burst into flames before making it even 1 percent of 

your way to the center of the planet. By the time you get to the Earth’s second 

layer, the mantle, temperatures rocket up to 1,000 degrees celsius or over 1,800 degrees 

fahrenheit, and it only gets hotter from here. The second principal concern to 

your immediate health is pressure - the highest air pressure we experience on the 

surface of the Earth is a little under 16 psi, or pounds per square inch. That’s with the full weight of Earth’s atmosphere 

pressing down on top of you. If the air pressure and temperature of the air in the tunnel increased at the same rate 

as it does at the planet’s surface, you’d only have to fall about 50 kilometres 

or 30miles before the pressure would exceed 15,000 psi, which is roughly equivalent to 

pressure found at the bottom of the ocean. So your very sophisticated 

and futuristic heat-resistant protective suit would also have 

to be very-well pressurized too. But let’s make a few more far-fetched 

assumptions at this point and assert that our wondrous hole-through-the-earth is 

not only stable, but temperature-controlled and a sealed vacuum. That would allow us to 

circumvent being simultaneously burnt to a crisp and crushed to a fine powder early 

on in our journey, which would be nice. As long as you have a decent 

air-supply, you’re good to go, right? Wrong! Unfortunately, your problems don’t stop there. Even ignoring the issues with heat and pressure,

the very fact that the Earth is spinning presents a serious threat to your successful 

descent, not to mention your survival. In the same way that the outer edges of a 

spinning record (which are those big black disc thingies that old people and hipsters 

use to play music) rotate faster than at points closer to the centre, the surface of the 

Earth rotates faster than deeper sections do. At sufficiently large scales, the consequences 

of this arise as the Coriolis Effect, and mean that as the Earth rotates, a perfectly vertical descent towards the 

planet’s core under only the force of gravity will eventually move out of 

alignment with the tunnel itself. This will cause you to smash into the interior 

walls of the tunnel at great speed. Not great. To get around this problem, you could utilize 

some kind of propulsion system built into your already very impressive suit to gently nudge 

you back on track as you fall through the Earth. Alternatively, you can side-step 

this problem altogether by boring the tunnel directly through 

the Earth’s axis of rotation, which would require the hole to be 

built between the North and South pole. So assuming you could build an impossibly stable, 

temperature-controlled and vacuum-sealed tunnel directly through the Earth, as well 

as an incredibly advanced dive suit to supply you with oxygen, you could in 

theory survive a fall into said hole. That the tunnel is now a vacuum also provides considerable benefits 

to the ease and comfort of your trip. Traveling through air always incurs 

air resistance, which not only imparts turbulence but also significantly 

slows you down. When the force of air resistance on a falling object increases 

to equal that of the force of gravity, said object has reached its “terminal 

velocity” and cannot fall any faster. Given that the average human in a stable 

belly-down position has a terminal velocity in freefall of about, 200 kilometers-per-hour 

(or about 120 miles-per-hour), it’s probably going to take you well over a day of falling 

to reach the center of the Earth. And that’s not even considering all the previously mentioned 

deadly issues with super hot and super dense air. Plenty of time to check out some 

things to do at your destination, book your hotel, and maybe hire a car 

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nordvpn.com/debunked or Use CODE DEBUNKED Right, so let’s get back to falling through 

the Earth to said desired destination! If we’re falling in a sealed vacuum, it will 

negate all the previously mentioned deadly issues with super hot and super dense air, and it also 

means a sluggish descent is no longer a problem. In the absence of air resistance, you’d 

be able to speed past terminal velocity in a matter of seconds, and continue picking up 

speed at an alarming yet probably thrilling rate. As you plummet towards the core, the 

resultant force being exerted on you will be decreasing, this in turn 

slows the rate of your acceleration as you approach your maximum 

velocity at the center of our planet. So what sort of exhilarating speeds can you 

expect to hit at the equilibrium of your journey? Well, for your futuristic dive suit let’s use 

your average NASA space suit as they come with a Life Support Backpack and generally 

do pretty well in the vacuum of space… Yes I’m aware space is not a true vacuum. …one of these plus the mass of 

an average human is around 190kg. Using our calculations, this means you 

would hit the center of the Earth at a whopping 28,000 km/h, that’s over 

17,000 miles per hour! And means, this half of the journey would 

take a little over 21 minutes. Fun fact alert! At the center of the planet, you’d 

also experience weightlessness akin to floating in outer space. Unlike standing on the Earth’s 

surface with its mass entirely beneath you, pulling you downwards, at the Earth’s center, 

the planet’s mass is all around you, pulling you in all directions. As the Earth is near-enough 

spherical, these gravitational forces cancel each other out, allowing you to merrily levitate like 

a scientist on the International Space Station. Not that you’d really be there long enough to 

notice, given that in this situation when you pass the Earth’s center you’d be traveling 

at roughly 22 times the speed of sound. As soon as you shoot through the planet’s 

center, all the gravitational forces that were acting upon you before will now begin 

acting upon you in the opposite direction. The further and further you move 

away from the planet’s centrepoint, the amount of the Earth that is behind you 

increases, progressively pulling against you. This will slow you down considerably as you 

hurtle back towards the planet’s surface. This motion your body is undergoing is 

referred to as Simple Harmonic Motion. Think of it like being attached to an enormously 

long spring that stretches to a maximum length of 12,742,000 meters, nearly 42 million feet, which 

just so happens to be the diameter of our planet. Once it reaches its maximum displacement on 

the other side of the planet you would come to a complete stop at exactly the 

same distance from the Earth core as the distance you fell to the 

Earth’s core when you jumped in. As a result, the journey from 

the center of the Earth to the other end of the tunnel will 

also take around 21 minutes, for a total trip duration through the entire 

planet of just 42 minutes and 30 seconds. With you now at a complete stop, 

your velocity will obviously be zero, but the force exerted on you at 

surface level is at its maximum… so unless you have someone there to catch you, you’re just going to immediately start falling 

back down towards the center of the planet. At this point, the process would start again, 

and, in the absence of anything to stop you, you will simply oscillate through 

Earth indefinitely. This would leave you oscillating sinusoidally between the 

opposite ends of the tunnel for all eternity, appearing at each end every 42 minutes 

like some kind of haunting warning to anyone else foolish enough to jump into a 

hole going through the center of the Earth. Or you could just, y’know… grab 

onto the side or something.