Earth has a hidden layer, and no one knows exactly what it is

Earth may contain more layers than scientists thought.

New research has found that there may be a hidden layer within Earth’s solid inner core – an inner core, if you will. The exact nature of this layer is ambiguous, but it could have something to do with changes in iron’s structure under extreme temperatures and stress. Joe Stephenson, a PhD student in seismology at the Australian National University in Canberra who led the research, said the study reveals that there is more complexity in the inner core than previously anticipated.

“It’s not just a solid ball of iron,” Stevenson told Live Science.

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Complex kernel

The core of the Earth consists of two parts. The liquid outer core begins about 1,800 miles (2,897 kilometers) from the Earth’s surface and consists of liquid minerals at temperatures from 4,000 to 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,204 to 4,982 degrees Celsius). About 3,200 miles (5,150 km) below the Earth’s surface, the core is transported to solid iron (and very little nickel).

The first signs that there might be something interesting lurking in the inner core center date back to the 1980s. Because there’s no way to get to the inner core, where temperatures are close to those on the surface of the sun, scientists use earthquake waves to make images of the core. Waves from an earthquake on one side of the planet detected on the other side of the planet bring about subtle changes that scientists can use to recreate a picture of what they went through.

Curiously, when waves pass through the core from north to south, they travel faster than waves that pass through the core parallel to Earth’s equator. No one knows why this is, Stevenson said, but it’s a consistent finding. The technical term for this weirdness is anisotropy.

Deep mysteries

But in the center of the inner core, something different seems to be observed by scientists in the early 2000s. At this depth, anisotropy appears to not match the rest of the inner core.

“Over the past two decades, it has been unclear exactly what this signal is at the center of the Earth in the data and why we see it,” Stevenson said.

Stephenson and her colleagues compiled a dataset of about 100,000 seismic waves that passed through this level of the core and applied an algorithm looking for the best physical explanation of what is happening to explain the data. What they find is that in the inner core, starting at 400 miles (650 km) from the center of the Earth, the anisotropy in the slow direction is no longer exactly parallel to the equator, but rather 54 degrees.

“This isn’t just data noise, it’s really something that is there,” said Stevenson.

But it is not easy to define what this thing is. Researchers are now working with metallurgical physicists and geodynamicists to try to come up with models of the inner-inner core that would explain this change. Stevenson said that when the planet cools, the inner core cools and expands, so it could be that the inner and outer core structure is something the way iron crystallizes as it cools, or it could be due to changes in the way the metal behaves. Great temperatures and pressures.

Core imaging is complex, in part because the deep earthquakes that scientists use to photograph do not occur evenly around the world. This choppy data set creates blind spots. Seismologists and geophysicists are now working on ways to devise subtle types of earthquake waves called strange phases that have passed through the inner core. These phases are usually too accurate to be extracted from a single earthquake, but can be detected in large data sets of thousands of earthquakes.

Stevenson said the core is important for understanding, because its eddy interactions create the Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic field, in turn, protects the planet from charged particles streaming from the sun. This protection enabled life to evolve.

“It’s really important,” said Stevenson.

The research was published on December 7, 2020 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

Originally published on Live Science.

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