TARZONA, NICOLE CHARLEY M.

WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT (CE-SCI 3)

EARTH’S INNER CORE

“Earth’s inner core may have stopped turning and could go into reverse.”
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.
What they found was unexpected, they said. Since 2009, seismic records, which
previously changed over time, showed little difference. This, they said, suggested that the
inner core rotation had paused.
“We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its
rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back,” they wrote in the
study.
“When you look at the decade between 1980 and 1990 you see clear change but
when you see 2010 to 2020 you don’t see much change,” added Song.
The spin of the inner core is driven by the magnetic field generated in the outer core
and balanced by the gravitational effects of the mantle. Knowing how the inner core rotates
could shed light on how these layers interact and other processes deep in the Earth.
However, the speed of this rotation, and whether it varies, is debated, said Hrvoje
Tkalcic, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the
study,
“The inner core doesn’t come to a full stop,” he said. The study’s finding, he said,
“means that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade
ago when it was spinning a bit faster.”
“Nothing cataclysmic is happening,” he added.
Song and Yang argue that, based on their calculations, a small imbalance in the
electromagnetic and gravitational forces could slow and even reverse the inner core’s
rotation. They believe this is part of a seven-decade cycle, and that the turning point prior
to the one they detected in their data around 2009/2010 occurred in the early 1970s.