In Dante's Inferno, the outcast Florentine poet took literary revenge on his political enemies by sentencing them to an eternity of torture without parole. They served their time locked inside Earth, writhing away in a circular, split-level hell, where the suffering grew more intense with each successively deeper and smaller layer. Although modern geologists might scoff at Dante's portrayal of the world underground, the 14th-century writer was actually correct .about the basic architecture of the planet. As geophysi-cists know today, the globe's interior consists of several spherical shells—an outer crust, a rocky mantle, and a metallic core—with the heat and pressure growing progressively more excruciating as the depth increases.
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