Apparently there is another layer inside the inner core of the earth: a “ball” made of metal. That shows a new earthquake study.
Canberra – Although a Chinese research team recently found that the inner core of the earth appears to have stopped rotating relative to the mantle, the interior of the earth has not yet been fully explored. To learn more about what’s going on deep within our planet, researchers are using seismic waves, which are generated during earthquakes and travel through the different layers of the earth. How fr.de reported. There are always surprises, such as a new layer of earth.
A research group from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra has now succeeded in finding evidence of a phenomenon deep inside the Earth that scientists have suspected there for years. “The existence of a metal ball inside the Earth’s inner core was suspected about 20 years ago,” explains Thanh-Son Pham. “We are now providing another line of evidence to support the hypothesis,” the seismologist said in one communication.
Important find: In the inner core of the earth there is a “ball” made of metal
Not long ago, researchers assumed that the earth consists of four different large layers: the crust, the mantle, the liquid outer core and the solid inner core. The new study from Australia was in the journal Nature Communications published and according to the research team, provides evidence that there is a fifth layer – deep inside the earth.
To arrive at these findings, the research team examined about 200 earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 6 that had occurred in the past decade. They looked in particular at how the seismic waves moved through the Earth’s interior and found that the innermost part of the Earth’s inner core changed the speed of the seismic waves differently than the layer above it.
| Earth’s crust (to a depth of about 30 kilometers) |
| Earth’s mantle (to a depth of about 2900 kilometers) |
| Outer core (from about 3000 kilometers depth) |
| inner core of the earth (from about 5100 kilometers depth) |
| 650-kilometer ball (at the center of the earth) |
Newly discovered innermost core is about 650 kilometers across
In fact, the newly discovered innermost part of the Earth resembles the previously known inner core that surrounds it, says researcher Pham. In the study, the newly discovered innermost core of the Earth is described as a “ball” about 400 miles across. According to the research team, both this inner core and the layer that envelops it consist of an iron-nickel alloy with traces of other elements.
“The transition from the innermost (solid) sphere to the outer shell of the inner core (also a solid shell) appears to be gradual rather than sharp,” Pham explains CNN. “Therefore we cannot observe it via direct reflections of seismic waves.”
Inner core allows a glimpse into the planet’s past
Exploring the interior of the Earth’s inner core can help scientists learn more about Earth’s past and evolution. “This inner core is like a time capsule of Earth’s evolutionary history – it’s a fossilized record of our planet’s past,” explains Hrvoje Tkalčić, who worked with Pham on the study. The two researchers know that the interior of the earth has not yet been fully explored. “There are still many unanswered questions about the innermost core of the earth, which could solve the mystery of the formation of our planet,” emphasizes Tkalčić. (tab)