Earth’s core grows “unbalanced” and scientists don’t know why

There is a mystery brewing at the center of the Earth.

Scientists can only see them when studying seismic waves (tremors caused by earthquakes) passing through the solid inner core of the planet. For some reason, waves move through the core faster when they travel between the north and south poles than when they travel through the equator.

Researchers have known about this discrepancy – known as seismic anisotropy – for decades, but have been unable to come up with an explanation that matches the available data. Now, using computer simulations of core growth over the past billion years, a new study in the June 3 issue of Nature Geoscience offers a solution that finally seems to fit: Every year, little by little, the Earth’s inner core grows in an “unbalanced pattern, as new iron crystals form steadily Faster on the east side of the heart than on the west side.

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“The movement of liquid iron in the outer core transfers heat away from the inner core, causing it to freeze,” senior study author Daniel Frost, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. This means that the outer core receives more heat from the eastern side [under Indonesia] from the West [under Brazil]. “

To visualize this lopsided growth in the core, imagine a tree trunk with growth rings radiating from a central point, Frost said—but “the center of the rings deviates from the center of the tree,” so that the rings are spaced apart. On the east side of the tree and closer together on the west side.

A cross-section of the Earth’s inner core may look similar to this. However, the researchers said that this asymmetric growth does not mean that the inner core itself is deformed or at risk of misalignment.

The team’s model suggests that the Earth’s inner core is growing faster on its eastern side (on the left) than on the west. Gravity offsets asymmetric growth by pushing iron crystals toward the north and south poles (arrows). This tends to align the long axis of the iron crystals along the planet’s rotation axis (dashed line), which explains the different travel times of seismic waves through the inner core. (Photo credit: Marine Las Places)

On average, the radius of the inner core grows equally by about 0.04 inch (1 millimeter) each year. Gravity corrects unbalanced growth in the east by pushing new crystals westward. There, the crystals clump into lattice structures running along the north-south axis of the nucleus. These crystal structures, aligned to Earth’s poles, are ultrafast seismic routes that enable earthquake waves to travel more quickly in that direction, according to the team’s models.

Snowball dump

What causes this imbalance of the inner core, anyway? It’s hard to say that without looking at all the other layers of our planet, Frost said.

He said: “Every layer in the earth is controlled by what is above it, and it affects what is beneath it.” “The inner core freezes slowly from the liquid outer core, like a snowball adding more layers. Then the outer core is cooled by the mantle above it – so to ask why the inner core grows faster on one side than the other might ask why one side is cooler The scarf is more than the other?”

Frost said plate tectonics could be partly to blame. As cold tectonic plates sink deep below the Earth’s surface in subduction zones (places where one plate sinks under the other), they cool the mantle below. However, Frost said whether the mantle cooling can affect the inner core is still a matter of debate.

Also puzzling is whether or not unbalanced cooling in the core might affect the Earth’s magnetic field. The modern magnetic field is driven by the movement of liquid iron in the outer core; The movement of this fluid in turn is driven by the heat lost from the inner core. Frost said that if the inner core was losing more heat in the east than in the west, the outer core would move more in the east, too.

“The question is, does this change the strength of the magnetic field?” he added.

Questions of this magnitude are beyond the scope of the team’s new paper, but Frost said he has begun work on new research with a team of geomagnetic scientists to investigate some of the possibilities.

Originally published on Live Science.

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