Re: Is the earth growing...?

Miles,

Good question! Your pile of leaves will grow each year, but every fall 
when you start piling on new leaves, you will see the pile is smaller 
than when you finished raking the previous year. The bugs in the leaf 
pile slowly turn the leaves into dirt, and in this process much of the 
material is released back into the air, where it came from. 

Trees make leaves by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, and 
microscopic organisms that consume the fallen leaves reverse this 
process, turning the leaves back into carbon dioxide. While a specific 
location, like the back of your barn, may temporarily pile up, the 
overall balance for the earth is nearly even. It is not entirely even, 
though: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has actually been increasing. 
However, even if the solid Earth and the atmosphere are out of balance, 
the total of both is very stable, because only a very, very tiny amount 
of material escapes into outer space or arrives on Earth from outer space 
each year.