INDIA: According to reports, the planet’s inner core appears to have ceased rotating in the same direction as the rest of the body.
Media reports on Monday said that a study found that the hot iron ball, which seems to be about the size of Pluto, may be spinning in the opposite direction of the clock.
The “planet within the globe,” located around 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) below the surface, has its own independent rotation. This is because it can float in the liquid outer core of metal.
The most recent study, which was published in the journal “Nature Geoscience,” looked at seismic waves from earthquakes that happened many times over the past 60 years.
The goal of this investigation, carried out by the Peking University researchers Xiaodong Song and Yi Yang, was to monitor the motion of the inner core.
The study’s authors discovered that the inner core’s rotation “came to nearly a halt about 2009 and then turned in the opposite direction.”
These scientists said the inner core swings back and forth about the Earth’s surface, much like a swing.
Around seven decades make up one swing cycle. The experts said that this indicates that it reverses course every 35 years.
Early in the 1970s, it shifted course, and in the middle of the 2040s, it might do so once more.
According to them, slight fluctuations in the precise amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis, known as the “length of the day,” correspond to changes in this rotation.
However, not all scientists agree with this. According to geophysicist John Vidale of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research, Yang and Song “identified this recent 10-year period that had less activity than before, and I think that’s probably reliable.” But Vidale claims that after that, things became tense.
He and a colleague revealed in 2022 that seismic signals from nuclear testing indicate the inner core may rotate in the opposite direction approximately every three years.
Others have hypothesized that the inner core isn’t moving at all. They assert that modifications may instead explain the variations in wave travel times to the surface of the inner core.
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