Earth’s core is stopping spinning, what does that mean?

A new study finds that the rotation of Earth’s inner core is slowing down, as part of a 70-year cycle in which its rotation changes.

In school, we learned that the Earth’s inner core is a solid iron ball slightly smaller than the Moon and subject to enormous pressures and temperatures. But it was not until the mid-1990s that it was discovered that, in addition, this metallic sphere at the heart of our planet rotated independently. a recent study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that around 2009, the Earth’s core began to rotate more slowly, for a while it rotated in sync with the Earth’s crust and is now lagging behind.

The core is 2,400 km in diameter and lies 5,000 km deep below the surface. It is surrounded by an outer core of superheated liquid iron and other materials, which allows it to rotate freely. Geologists believe that the energy released by the inner core causes the fluid in the outer core to move, generating electrical currents that, in turn, generate a magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This magnetic shield protects surface organisms from the most harmful cosmic radiation.

don’t panic

So if the core’s rotation stops, will life on Earth go extinct? Don’t panic, because it’s a phenomenon that repeats itself every 70 years, according to the study’s authors. The same thing seems to have happened before, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This is a controversial issue, as it is still not well understood what governs the behavior of the kernel. The lead author of the new study, Xiaodong Song, a geoscientist at Peking University, is the same person who in 1996 first provided evidence of the rotation of the Earth’s core.

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Despite the many science fiction films in which the Earth’s core is drilled, currently this is impossible. How then can we discover its composition and behavior? Scientists use disturbances in the seismic waves caused by earthquakes traveling around the planet to figure out what’s going on inside. Seismic waves travel at different speeds, depending on the density and temperature of the rock, and work like an X-ray of the Earth.

What happens when the nucleus slows down

One of the consequences of the Earth’s core’s slowing rotation could be a change in the length of the day, although these changes are measured in milliseconds. The length of the day has increased by a few milliseconds over the centuries mainly due to the Moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth, but other variations have been found that were unexplained until now. According to Song, these variations may coincide with changes in core rotation.

Even so, other geologists disagree and maintain that these variations have nothing to do with the speed of rotation, but with changes in the surface of the core. Beijing scientists now expect more earthquakes that send seismic waves through the core to further test their theory. NASA also plans to launch a mission to explore what could be the exposed metallic core of an ancient destroyed planet, which could shed light on the inner workings of Earth and other worlds in our solar system.

REFERENCE

Multidecadal variation of the rotation of the Earth’s inner core

Photograph: Shea Huening

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