Earth’s inner core may now be in the process of changing direction: ScienceAlert

Few of us think deeply about the Earth’s rotation and its contents until a sudden movement, earthquake, or volcanic eruption brings us to our senses.

However, geoscientists are better acquainted with the dynamics of Earth’s bowels, and have just discovered that Earth’s solid inner core—which normally rotates within a near-frictionless molten outer shell—seems to have slowed to a grinding halt.

Before anyone panics and looks for a copy of a 20-year-old sci-fi movie predicting such an event in hopes of inspiring a solution, this isn’t the first time such an event has been recorded. It’s not even the first in recent history.

“We show striking observations that the inner core has nearly stopped spinning in the last decade and may be experiencing a regression in the multi-decadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s,” geophysicists Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song of Peking University write in their published paper.

We’ve only known for a few decades that Earth’s inner core rotates with respect to the mantle above it, as this was confirmed in 1996 by Song and fellow seismologist Paul Richards at Columbia University. Prior to their work, the idea that Earth’s inner core rotated separately from the rest of the planet was an unproven theory, predicted by an unproven model of Earth’s magnetic field.

Since then, Earth scientists have tried to find out — from a distance of 5,100 kilometers (or 3,170 miles) — how fast or slow the inner core is spinning.

Initially, the inner core was thought to make a full revolution every 400 years, driven by electromagnetic torque and balanced by the force of gravity. But other scientists soon assumed that it rotates much more slowly, taking 1,000 years or more to spin completely.

The speed of this rotation, and whether it was variable, is still debated today. However, the inner core goes about its merry way, unaware of the noisy controversy above.

Song went back to the same method he and Richards used to deduce that the inner core rotates around. In 1996, the duo tracked seismic wave readouts from frequent earthquakes called multiples that traversed the inner core, from the South Atlantic to Alaska, between 1967 and 1995.

Had the inner core not moved, the shock waves should have traveled the same path. But Song and Richards showed that seismic waves accelerated by a fraction of a second from the 60s to the 90s.

Now, in the new study with Yang, Song has revisited that old data, comparing it with more recent patterns of near-identical seismic waves that indicate the inner core has slowed to a halt — and may even be reversing.

They found that since about 2009, tracks that previously showed significant temporal variance showed little change as seismic waves passed through the core and out on the other side. Any time difference disappeared.

“This globally consistent pattern indicates that the rotation of the inner core has recently paused,” Yang and Song write.

This recent deceleration of the inner core also appears to be related to a spin reversal, Yang and Song say, the solid iron ball sliding backwards in the other direction as part of a seven-decade oscillation.

Based on their calculations, a small imbalance in the electromagnetic and gravitational forces would be enough to slow the rotation of the inner core, and then reverse it as observed.

That’s not all. The researchers point out that the seven changing decades coincide with other cyclical changes that can be observed at the Earth’s surface, in day length and magnetic field, both of which have a periodicity of six to seven decades. Decades of climate observational patterns of global average temperature and sea level rise also seem to align oddly.

To Yang and Song, this repetitive oscillation, which shifts slowly and barely discernible and oscillates back and forth every 60 to 70 years, seems to indicate “a system of resonance through the different layers of the earth”—as if the whole planet were sounding a single melody. .

Because Earth’s inner core is thought to be dynamically bound to its outer layers, linked to the outer core by electromagnetic coupling and bound to the mantle by gravitational forces, the study could also help our understanding of how processes deep inside our planet affect its surface – the thin crust we live on, sitting atop. spiral underwear.

Yang and Song conclude, “These observations provide evidence for dynamic interactions between Earth’s layers, from the deepest interior to the surface.”

The study has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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