Something also happens in the center of the earth

Something also happens in the center of the earth

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A few weeks ago Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, both from Peking University, in the magazine Nature Geoscience they wrote that the rotation of the Earth’s core may have stopped. That would have happened a few years ago. The claim has puzzled the scientific community. Up until now we were convinced that the inner core was spinning faster than the rest of the Earth. Its movement would contribute to the formation of the magnetic field that surrounds our planet and protects it from harmful radiation from the sun. The conditional is a must. The consequences are not clear also because the anomaly would have occurred for some years without significant impacts on our lives.

The debate that the study has sparked is proof of how little we still know about what is happening under our feet. More specifically, we are talking about what happens about five thousand kilometers away, in the deepest layers of the Earth. According to experts, in the center of the Earth there is a solid core made up of iron and nickel, a sort of huge crystal at a temperature of 6,000 degrees Celsius. As explained by Carlo Doglioni, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, we know everything we can know by interpreting the data on the way seismic waves travel within the planet, integrating it with principles of celestial physics and mechanics.

In the summer a study conducted by the University of Southern California and published in Science Advances he had already hypothesized something in line with the conclusions of the Chinese study. The Earth’s core would change rotation every six years, swinging like a small ball on a string.

«We also note – explained the scholar to Ansa – that the length of the day has increased and decreased as expected: a phenomenon defined as surprising even by the same authors of the research, according to whom, in any case, the oscillation remains the most probable interpretation to explain current data. In short, the inner core would have rotated slightly more slowly from 1969 to 1971 and then would have moved in the other direction from ’71 to ’74. The result, however, did not convince a large part of the scientific community at the time. However, the study does not explain what would have caused the slowdown. But it suggests that what happened in the 1970s could happen. Another hypothesis in the field is that on the cooling of the core. In essence, the heart of the Earth would be cooling faster than expected. The hypothesis in this case is presented on Earth and Planetary Science Letters from an international team led by Motohiko Murakami from ETH Zurich.

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Some might become agitated in the face of a lack of certainty. You need to have faith in research and patience. That’s the beauty of science.

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