Scientists have discovered that Earth’s inner core has stopped spinning and is about to change the direction of its rotation.
Every morning, much like clockwork, we get up, search through our supplies for food, and boil that perfect cup of coffee (or tea) to see us through the day. The same daily routine is not particularly annoying at first, but as soon as clouds of monotony start to loom over us, we start looking for change. And the Earth’s inner core concurs with this human predisposition thousands of kilometer’s beneath our feet!
The inner core of our planet has slowed down, according to scientists, simply because it has been revolving in the same direction for a long time. Now is the right time to make a change.
According to a study conducted by researchers at Peking University in Beijing, the Earth’s inner core, which typically spins faster than the mantle, stopped doing so some time in the last decade. Instead, it seems to be changing the spin’s polarity.
investigating the mysteries of the Earth’s core
At Columbia University, seismologists Xiaodong Song and Paul Richards confirmed less than ten years ago that the Earth’s inner core, located around 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) below the surface, can spin independently.
By following seismic wave measurements from numerous earthquakes that passed through the inner core between 1967 and 1995, from the South Atlantic to Alaska, the researchers were able to determine the rotation of the inner core.
They later discovered that while the earthquakes all started in the same area, the seismic waves they produced had a different travel time. This demonstrated that the inner core rotated more quickly than the planet’s mantle.
Geophysicists have now reviewed the 1960s–1990s seismic data and compared it to more contemporary seismic patterns in this new study. Their findings indicate that the Earth’s inner core has stopped moving and may even be changing the spin’s direction.
In their work, geophysicists Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song state that “we reveal surprise results that imply the inner core has practically paused its rotation in the last decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s.”
According to the patterns, inner core spinning stopped around 2009. It’s interesting to note that this isn’t the first time such a thing has been documented!
It turns out that the inner core of the Earth swings back and forth like a swing. This swing has a cycle length of roughly seven decades, which indicates that the inner core rotates in a different direction once every 35 years. A similar phenomena occurred in the 1970s, and the next shift in trend might take place in the 2040s.
In reality, this seven-decade oscillation also appears to be correlated with variations in the Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields, as well as with more general geophysical phenomena that affect the length of the day.
Yang and Song, the study’s co-authors, state that their results “offer evidence for dynamic interactions between the Earth’s layers, from the deep interior to the surface.”
In addition, they have hinted to “a resonance system across multiple Earth layers,” as if the planet’s heart is still beating to the same rhythm despite the intricate connections and networks that govern a variety of phenomena in this complicated environment.