New Layer Of Earth’s Core Confirmed
A team of scientists from Australia confirmed the existence of another layer of the Earth’s core. While it will hard to analyze it will allow us to learn more about the history of our planet.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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The main author of the study – geophysicist Joanne Stephenson – wasn’t exactly hiding her excitement when she said – it is exciting and it could mean we will have to rewrite textbooks. The study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research
The composition of the newly discovered layer suggests that the history of our planet could have included two different phases of cooling down. So far, we thought that the Earth is made from four spheres – the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core.
The majority of what we know about what lies beneath the crust comes from our studies of volcanoes and seismic waves. From these indirect observations, scientists concluded that the inner core with its temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Celsius makes up just a single percent of the volume of the Earth.
So, what about the new layer? It’s been hiding from us inside the inner core. Some have speculated about it for some years but there was no conclusive evidence for its existence so far. While some models suggested that the material of the inner core routes seismic waves in parallel to the equator others claim the combination of materials in the inner core causes waves that head parallel to the rotational axis of the Earth.
That’s why the scientists used an algorithm that had the goal of going through several thousand of the inner core’s models. Stephenson and her colleagues – with this approach – found evidence that shows that the inner core of the Earth can have two layers.
While the conclusions are consistent with other studies about the inner core we will definitely need more research to confirm it. But at the very least our new knowledge could explain why some experimental evidence is inconsistent with our current models of the Earth.
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