Scientists have warned that the end of the world may be closer than they had originally thought after making an unsuspecting discovery.
Researchers said the Earth's interior has been cooling at a faster pace than they previously expected.
When Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, extreme temperatures were felt on its surface as it was covered in a sea of magma.
Over millions of years, the planet's surface cooled to form a crust.
It has been releasing heat from its core to the surface since then, and this release drives mantle convection and tectonic activities.
ETH Professor Motohiko Murakami and his colleagues from Carnegie Institution for Science developed a sophisticated measuring system to measure the thermal conductivity of bridgmanite in a laboratory.
They used a recently developed optical absorption measurement system in a diamond unit heated with a pulsed laser for the measurements.
Prof Murakami told spaceref.com, "This measurement system let us show that the thermal conductivity of bridgmanite is about 1.5 times higher than assumed."
The study found that the heat flow from the Earth's core into the mantle is higher than scientists previously thought.
This greater heat flow increases mantle convection and accelerates the cooling of the Earth, which will eventually result in the Earth becoming a cold wasteland like Mars.
This may cause plate tectonics to decelerate faster than researchers expected based on previous heat conduction values.
Murakami and his colleagues have also shown that the faster cooling of the mantle will change the stable mineral phases at the core-mantle boundary.
When it cools, bridgmanite, a magnesium-silicate mineral and the most abundant mineral on Earth making up around 70 per cent of the lower mantle turns into the mineral post-perovskite.
As post-perovskite forms within the core-mantle and begins to dominate, the cooling of the mantle may accelerate further.
Researchers estimate, since this mineral conducts heat even more efficiently than bridgmanite, it will allow the Earth to cool quicker.
Prof Murakami said: "Our results could give us a new perspective on the evolution of the Earth's dynamics. They suggest that Earth, like the other rocky planets Mercury and Mars, is cooling and becoming inactive much faster than expected."
He added: "We still don't know enough about these kinds of events to pin down their timing."
