Eli5: if it were possible to weight earth precisely, to the gram, would its weight vary or stay the same over time?

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I understand that all on the surface is likely small in comparison the earth whole mass, but if all that is created and all which disappears is just a renewal of the same elements..is earth’s weight a constant..?

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7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

No, the Earth’s mass is constantly changing. We constantly gain and lose mass as hydrogen and helium float off into space and we gain mass in the form of meteors and other space dust. On average, Earth loses more mass than it gains, but it’s such a tiny amount that it doesn’t matter.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The Earth does accumulate a fair amount of interplanetary dust and debris daily, as evidenced by the miscellaneous shooting stars that you might see during the night

Anonymous 0 Comments

No, Earth’s weight is not constant. Every time you see a “shooting star”, that’s a meteor(ite?) that’s burning up on entering Earth’s atmosphere, which adds mass to the Earth. At the same time, many of the very light gases, like helium, that are present in the Earth’s atmosphere can be lost to space due to electromagnetic “winds”.

Earth’s mass is never constant.

Anonymous 0 Comments

As many said, space debris amounts to thousands of tons per year. But even if you clean up space to perfection, the energy(!) we receive and use would be measurable as described by E=mc², i.e. energy has the tiniest bit of mass. We use roughly one ton of energy per year as fossil fuels, and receive 43000 tons as light from the sun; the latter almost entirely gets back into space sooner or later. If the Earth’s atmosphere warms by 1°C on average, that amounts to 40 tons of energy as well.

tl;dr: climate change makes the world fatter.

Anonymous 0 Comments

No, Earth’s mass changes constantly because *it is not a closed system*. Material is constantly being added to Earth from space, and other material is constantly being lost from Earth into space as well. Compared to the mass of Earth, this mass gaining and losing is very small, but in absolute terms it’s quite a bit of stuff:

* **Earth is gaining 45,000 tons per year**, mostly from picking up space dust and pulling in small meteorites. But
* **Earth is losing about 100,000 tons per year** from the loss of the atmosphere’s lightest gases drifting off into space.

That comes out to a **net loss of about 55,000,000 kg per year**! Multiply that by 1000x to get the change in grams like you were asking about.

However, even that large-seeming mass is actually smaller than the +/- range on our current best estimate of Earth’s mass, so this mass loss is too small to affect the estimate right now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Variation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Variation)

Anonymous 0 Comments

The Earth doesn’t have a “weight”, but it does have a mass. For the purposes of your question the meaning is the same. No, the mass of the Earth changes over time.

Meteors hit the Earth and are added to our mass. (about 44 tonnes a day).

Gas, mostly hydrogen floats high enough to be lost to the solar wind so we lose a bit of mass. (About 90 tonnes a day)

If you’re really counting details, some space probes are launched to never return.

In total we generally are losing mass day-by-day, but not much in the scheme of things, even over 100’s of millions of years.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Everybody seems to be discussing addition of mass due to debris and dust from outer space making it to earth, but would the mass decrease? For instance, burning trees changes the wood to ash, and the flames are creating heat and light energy. The remaining ash obviously doesn’t have the same mass as a full tree, so would that ultimately reduce the mass of the earth?