New research suggests that the Earth’s inner core rotation may have stopped, or it may even be going backward.

The crust, the mantle, and the inner and outer cores make up the Earth. The solid inner core is about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust. It is separated from the semi-solid mantle by the liquid outer body, which lets the internal core spin at a different speed than the rest of the Earth.

The Earth’s core is about the size of Mars, with a radius of almost 2,200 miles. It is mostly iron and nickel and makes up about one-third of the mass of the Earth.

CNN
CNN

Yi Yang, an associate research scientist at Peking University, and Xiaodong Song, a Peking University chair professor, studied seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s inner core along the same paths since the 1960s to figure out how fast the inner core is spinning. Their research was published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday.

They said that what they found was a surprise. Since 2009, there hasn’t been much change in seismic records, which used to change over time. They said that this showed that the inner core had stopped turning.

In the study, they wrote, “We show surprising observations that show the inner core has almost stopped spinning in the last 10 years and may be going backward.”

“If you look at the decade from 1980 to 1990, you can see a lot of change, but from 2010 to 2020, you don’t see much change,” said Song.

The outer core’s magnetic field makes the inner core spin, and the gravitational pull of the mantle keeps it from going too fast. If we knew how the inner core rotates, we could learn more about how these layers interact and other things that happen deep in the Earth.

Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geophysicist at the Australian National University who did not participate in the study, said that it is unclear how fast this rotation is or if it changes.

He said, “The inner core doesn’t come to a complete stop.” He said that the study’s results show that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than it was ten years ago when it spun faster.

“Nothing terrible is going on,” he added.

Ong and Yang say that their calculations show that a small difference between the electromagnetic and gravitational forces could slow or even stop the rotation of the inner core. They think this is part of a seven-decade cycle and that the previous turning point they found in their data around 2009/2010 happened in the early 1970s.

The study’s “data analysis is sound,” said Tkalcic, who wrote “The Earth’s Inner Core: Revealed by Observational Seismology.” The study’s results, on the other hand, “should be taken with a grain of salt” because “more data and new methods are needed to shed light on this interesting problem.”

Song and Yang both agreed that there was a need for more research.

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