Despite what flat earthers may think, Science has proven that the Earth is a kind of planetary matryoshka, as if it were a planet within another planet, like a kind of onion made up of layers of different elements. The core and each of the layers that make up the Earth are in continuous interaction, which generates various geological events, such as the formation of mountains, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. In the case of the nucleus, precisely this rotational movement of this great mass of iron at a depth of more than 5,000 kilometers from the earth’s crust is what generates terrestrial magnetism by acting as a huge dynamo.
Science has spent hundreds of years studying the phenomena that occur in the earth’s crust, a layer barely 40 kilometers thick, which is where all the phenomena that affect us the most occur. However, thanks to new scientific advances, we increasingly know better the dynamics that occur inside the Earth.
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Precisely in this regard, Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, two researchers from the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Geophysics of Peking University, in China, have just published in the prestigious journal nature geoscience a study on the behavior of the Earth’s core that has surprised the scientific community.
According to data obtained by scientists, the rotation speed of the Earth’s core would have slowed down in recent years and, in addition, it would have begun to turn in the opposite direction, towards the west. In the words of the Institute of Geosciences (IGEO), “what the new research affirms is that the core has decreased in speed and is ‘out of step’ with the rotation speed of the rest of the planet. It is as if we, the crust, were getting ahead of ourselves. with respect to the nucleus”, they have pointed out.
To reach these conclusions, researchers have analyzed the seismic waves produced by nearly 200 earthquakes at two points far away from Earth: Alaska (near the North Pole) and the South Sandwich Islands (near Antarctica). And so, the measurement of the speed of wave travel Through the layers, it allows us to better understand what is happening inside the Earth.
Cyclic geological pattern
In addition, scientists have verified that this reduction in speed occurred in the 1970s, which has led them to suggest that it could be a cyclical pattern on our planet.
As they say in the magazine Nature, “the data suggest that the inner core might even be in the process of reverting to subrotation. If so, it’s likely that something is going on with the magnetic and gravitational forces that drive the rotation of the inner core. Such changes could link the inner core to broader geophysical phenomena, such as increases or decreases in the length of a day on Earth..”
In the same way, as they themselves point out in the conclusions of the research, “these observations provide evidence that there are dynamic interactions between the different layers of the Earthfrom the deepest interior to the surface, possibly due to gravitational coupling and angular momentum exchange from the core and mantle to the surface.”
