What Are The Scientific Errors In 'Journey To The Center Of The Earth'?

As someone who geeked out over geology in school, 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' makes me chuckle with its wild liberties. The biggest whopper is the idea of giant caverns near the core—pressure at those depths would crush anything hollow into molten paste. The novel treats temperature like a mild sauna when reality would vaporize humans instantly. Dinosaurs surviving underground? Cute, but biologically impossible without sunlight or ecosystems. The magnetic compass scene is pure fiction too; magnetic fields don’t work that way so deep. Verne’s ocean at the center? Physics says liquid couldn’t exist under that much heat and pressure. Still love the adventure though—just don’t use it as a science textbook.

Reading 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' feels like watching a magician ignore physics for spectacle. Let’s break it down layer by layer.

The crust-to-core journey would take months, not days—drilling through rock isn’t a subway ride. Real-world drill projects like Kola Superdeep barely scratched 12 km after years, while Verne’s characters waltz through 6,000 km like it’s a hiking trail. The novel’s ‘hollow Earth’ concept contradicts seismic data showing a solid mantle and liquid outer core. Those volcanic tubes they slide down? They’d be hotter than steel mills, not cool enough for wooden raft rides.

Then there’s the biology. Giant mushrooms need photosynthesis, not geothermal vents. The ‘living fossils’ trope ignores evolution’s pace—species don’t stay unchanged for millennia. Verne’s atmospheric pressure calculations are off by factors of thousands too. Modern geology proves Earth’s interior is denser and hotter than 19th-century sci-fi could’ve imagined. Still, the book’s charm lies in how it inspired real scientists to explore the impossible.

Here’s the tea on 'Journey to the Center of the Earth'—it’s a masterpiece of imagination that flunks basic science. The characters survive falls that would pancake them into jelly, and breathe air where oxygen molecules would be crushed by pressure. That underground ocean? Water would superheat into plasma at those depths. The ‘luminous gas’ lighting the caves breaks chemistry laws—no gas glows eternally without energy input.

Verne’s dinosaurs are fantasy creatures, not science. Paleontology shows extinction was absolute, and no ecosystem could sustain large predators underground. The novel’s compass navigation ignores how magnetic fields warp near molten iron. Even the famous ‘Sneffels volcano’ entry point is nonsense—Icelandic volcanoes don’t connect to deep mantle tubes. Yet these ‘errors’ created iconic adventure fiction. Want accurate subterranean fiction? Try 'The Hole' by Hiroko Oyamada instead—it nails psychological realism over faux-science.