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The innermost core of the Earth is a solid ball of iron and nickel floating in a sea of molten rock, and its motion relative to the Earth itself appears to be slowing down. The inner core is slowing down so much that it is actually going into reverse, with the correct Los Angeles Times.
Earth’s inner core’s rotation has slowed dramatically Photo Archive
The discovery, made by Chinese Academy of Sciences geophysicist John Vidale and his colleague Wang Wei and published recently in the journal Nature, provides the most convincing evidence yet that the Earth’s core appears to have a mind of its own.
“It might oscillate back and forth, but it might also be on a random path. It goes in one direction for a while, then turns in another direction. Who knows what it will do next?”Videl said
Life on the surface is not affected for the time being
The fluctuations occurring 3,000 miles below us won’t have a noticeable effect on life on Earth’s surface, at least for now, Videl said.
“As far as I know, this has little impact on humans. This is part of understanding the evolution of the Earth. We want to understand in more detail what are the forces driving the inner core,” The researchers also said.
Scientists first learned the inner core was moving in the 1990s, he said. It took years to back up the theory with hard evidence, largely because it’s so difficult to study an object so far away — and suspended in a hellish ocean of liquid iron at temperatures between 8,000 and 10,000 degrees.
Instead, Vidale, who served as director of the USC Southern California Earthquake Center from 2017 to 2018, peered into the Earth’s interior by tracking seismic waves from earthquakes that occurred off the southern tip of South America. As the waves passed through the Earth’s center, they were recorded by 400 seismometers located on the other side of the planet, in Alaska and northern Canada. These sensors are the same type used to measure ground vibrations during nuclear tests.
“People thought the planet was empty”
He compared these precise readings with seismic signals recorded in previous years to see how well they matched. That’s how he determined that the rotation rate has slowed down since 2010. Before that, the core’s rotation rate was speeding up.
Vidale said the findings add to the mystery of one of the deepest and most unfathomable parts of our world. Literature and myths related to the center of the Earth have filled in the gaps in knowledge with all kinds of bizarre ideas.
“I’m not much of a philosopher, but we’ve all had nightmares about what’s going on inside the Earth”Vidale said. “Just a few hundred years ago, people thought this planet was empty and people lived there. It’s very strange – as strange as Jupiter, but it’s right under our feet.”
In Jules Verne’s 1864 science fiction classic, Journey to the Center of the Earth, A German professor, his nephew, and their guide descend to Earth via an Icelandic volcano, encountering caves, underground oceans, living dinosaurs, strange sea creatures, and even a giant prehistoric mastodon along the way, before eventually being expelled from Earth by a volcano off the coast of Sicily.
In the real world, even if there were a vehicle capable of digging into the core, no one could survive the unimaginable heat and enormous pressure, Vidale said.
It’s true that the outer core generates electric currents that support Earth’s magnetic field, but Vidale said changes in the Texas-sized inner core would be too small to have an effect.
“The mechanism is that the outer core rotates and creates a magnetic field, so it pulls the inner core back and forth in some way.””, Videl also said.
Fierce debate among researchers
The latest findings about the inner core have sparked a fierce disagreement among leading geoscientists and generated opposing theories, Vidale said. Some believe the core doesn’t rotate at all. Others insist that surface forces, such as earthquakes, temporarily change the rotation.
“It’s interesting because the nucleus is so large and it was a mystery how it could move in a measurable amount. We are making progress, seeing more things, talking to people around the world and trying to get more data (…) What our paper did is that it convinced the majority of the community”the scientists concluded.
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