It appears that Earth’s inner core contains a second core that is considerably deeper. Deep beneath Earth’s past, there are little-known chapters in its history, according to research.
The Earth’s core did not stop spinning or change directions, according to research. However, the research suggests that the Earth’s inner core, which spins separately from the rest of the planet, slowed down and that it cycles between slowing down and speeding up.
Earth’s Inner Core
The alteration in the inner core’s speed, according to scientists, may explain variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, be the reason for the magnetic poles’ long-term movement, or be a small part of small variations in the length of a day.
But each of these hypotheses regarding the inner core’s function is simply one of a few explanations that scientists think is most likely to capture the behavior of the inner core.
A solid iron ball that makes up the interior of the Earth is about as hot as the sun’s surface. The National Center for Family Learning claims that an outer core layer of liquid metal surrounds it.
According to Science Magazine and Nature, the study’s publishers, this layer of liquid metal divides the planet’s inner core from the rest of the body, allowing the core to rotate more quickly than the surface.
Two researchers from Peking University in China used historical earthquake data in their study, which was published in Nature Geoscience on January 23, 2023, to discover that the Earth’s deep core used to rotate more slowly than the surface but has now caught up with it. According to their theories, the core’s rotation speed varies every 70 years and will soon start to move slower than the surface.
The inner core rotates faster than the Earth’s surface for around half of the cycle and slower for the other half, according to scientists. The inner core rotates about at the same speed as the rest of the Earth as it alternates between its faster and slower phases.
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From Scientist’s Observation
The scorchingly hot inner core, with temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Celsius (9,000 degrees Fahrenheit), makes up only 1% of the entire volume of Earth, according to calculations based on these indirect observations.
Nevertheless, Stephenson and colleagues discovered evidence that suggests Earth’s inner core may possibly contain two separate layers a few years ago.
The team combed through thousands of inner core model projections and compared them to actual data collected by the International Seismological Center over many decades regarding the time it took for seismic waves to travel within the Earth.
Some models of the inner core’s anisotropy were judged to be more likely than others by the researchers after they examined how changes in the make-up of its material impact the properties of seismic waves.
Depending on the model, the inner core’s material can either accelerate seismic waves so that they travel more parallel to the equator or slow them down so that they travel more parallel to the axis around which the Earth rotates. Nonetheless, there is still some debate over the precise magnitude of the change at particular angles.
However, the study did find that the slow direction shifted to a 54-degree angle with depth in the inner core, whereas the quicker path of waves remained parallel to the axis.
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