🔗 Earth as a nuclear furnace (geothermal heat is mostly from radioactive decay)

Geothermal gradient is the rate of increasing temperature with respect to increasing depth in Earth's interior. Away from tectonic plate boundaries, it is about 25–30 °C/km (72–87 °F/mi) of depth near the surface in most of the world. Strictly speaking, geo-thermal necessarily refers to Earth but the concept may be applied to other planets.

Earth's internal heat comes from a combination of residual heat from planetary accretion, heat produced through radioactive decay, latent heat from core crystallization, and possibly heat from other sources. The major heat-producing isotopes in Earth are potassium-40, uranium-238, uranium-235, and thorium-232. At the center of the planet, the temperature may be up to 7,000 K and the pressure could reach 360 GPa (3.6 million atm). Because much of the heat is provided by radioactive decay, scientists believe that early in Earth history, before isotopes with short half-lives had been depleted, Earth's heat production would have been much higher. Heat production was twice that of present-day at approximately 3 billion years ago, resulting in larger temperature gradients within the Earth, larger rates of mantle convection and plate tectonics, allowing the production of igneous rocks such as komatiites that are no longer formed.