Earth’s inner core may have stopped turning and could go into reverse, study suggests
By , CNN.
The rotation of Earth’s inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests.
The Earth is formed of the crust, the mantle and the inner and outer cores. The solid inner core is situated about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust and is separated from the semi-solid mantle by the liquid outer core, which allows the inner core to rotate at a different speed from the rotation of the Earth itself.
With a radius of almost 2,200 miles, Earth’s core is about the size of Mars. It consists mostly of iron and nickel, and contains about about one-third of Earth’s mass.
In research published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday, Yi Yang, associate research scientist at Peking University, and Xiaodong Song, Peking University chair professor, studied seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s inner core along similar paths since the 1960s to infer how fast the inner core is spinning.
READ MORE: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/25/world/earth-core-turning-scli-scn-intl/index.html