Scientists make surprising discovery about the Earth's core that could affect the length of a day
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
Scientists accidentally stumbled upon a discovery about Earth's core which could shatter all we previously thought we knew about the structure.
Made up of two parts, the liquid outer core and solid inner core, Earth's core is roughly nine percent hotter than the surface of the Sun.
It plays a vital role in generating our planet's magnetic field, which shields us from dangerous levels of radiation and up until now, science buffs believed it was a solid sphere.
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But that could all be wrong, as experts and researchers from the University of Southern Carolina (USC) say they have accidentally discovered that the inner core may be more malleable than scientists originally thought.
John Vidale, who is a Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study, said the experts 'didn’t set out to define the physical nature of the inner core', and were actually researching something else entirely at the time.
“What we ended up discovering is evidence that the near surface of Earth’s inner core undergoes structural change," the researcher added.
Such evidence suggests an altering to the length of the day, though it remains unclear by how much at this stage.
Sitting around 3,000 to 4,000 miles beneath our planet's surface, Vidale says the edges of the inner core may have undergone a process called 'viscous deformation'.
The team of researchers suspect the core may have deformed by over 100 metres due to interactions with the balmy, molten outer core.
As part of their research, the team looked at 121 repeating earthquakes from 42 locations near the South Sandwich Islands in Antarctica.
And with their findings, the team discovered some seismic waves were behaving differently than anticipated, which could mean the inner core may be holding more physical activity than expected.
“The molten outer core is widely known to be turbulent, but its turbulence had not been observed to disrupt its neighbour the inner core on a human timescale,” Vidale added.
"What we’re observing in this study for the first time is likely the outer core disturbing the inner core."
The team's intriguing findings have been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.