This week we are puzzled by the publication of some Chinese theories (by Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, researchers at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Geophysics of Peking University) about the Earth’s core.
I find it interesting that material related to the Earth’s interior is ranked. Generally there is a tendency to do more service in foreign countries.
Except Jules Verne…
Laugh out loud! ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ is fiction …
At this point, what happens in the core of the Earth?
We’ll go in parts. Planet Earth is made of concentric layers. We have the egg shell, the earth’s crust. In truth, it takes up very little space, barely 30 kilometers while the Earth’s radius is 6,370 kilometers. Then, the mantle, which reaches up to 2,900 km and is solid. It moves at the same rate as our fingernails grow: between two and three centimeters a year.
And the nucleus, which concerns us today?
On the one hand, the outer nucleus is responsible for the liquid and the magnetic field. There, particles move much faster than in the mantle: 20 kilometers per year. More or less, like humans in prehistory.
Well, they were slow…
Prehistoric humans crossed the Americas at about the same speed. The outer core was discovered in the 1920s. The inner core was discovered in 1936, when Inge Lehmann demonstrated that a ball of iron and nickel was inside.
How did you reach that discovery?
With Soviet surveys in the Kola Peninsula, humans have only managed to explore up to 12 kilometers inside the Earth. It’s funny, on the upside we’ve got to the Moon and now we want to get to Mars; But below…
You know introspection travel usually costs more…
I agree with you. Laugh out loud!
How do you know the center of the earth?
with the waves. They are more easily assimilated than earthworks. Already in 2022 some publications were carrying data from nuclear tests between 1968 and 1974. It was said that superrotation in that interval was called subrotation. The subrotation underlies that inner core slightly slower than Earth’s. But it does not rotate in the opposite direction.
This week’s post invites other theories…
The confusion arises because it refers to the relative motion of the inner core with respect to the rest of the Earth. And if it spins a little slower, it looks like it’s spinning against us. We, as observers, would see it moving in the opposite direction, but it rotates in the same direction.
so calm down?
Undoubted. The change in speed affects the length of the day, and this is two microseconds every hundred years, a very small change in speed.
Does the length of the day change…?
It should be clarified, relative. 600 million years ago, when trilobites roamed around Murrero (Campo de Daroca area), the day lasted 20 hours and the years had 400 days. From estimates by the Assyrians and Babylonians (2000 BC) to current measurements with quantum clocks, the day has progressed to 50 thousandths of a second; But there the Moon and the tides have a lot to do with it.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day…
That said, the variation is minimal.
And the Earth, is it round?
Neither the earth is round nor the nucleus rotates in the opposite direction. The Earth is an ellipsoid: the equatorial radius is 20 kilometers greater than the polar radius. That is, Mount Everest (8,849 m) is closer to the center of the Earth than Chimborazo volcano (Ecuador, 6,263 m).
certainly true.
Therefore, relatively, taking as a reference the center of the Earth and not the terrestrial surface, Chimborazo is higher than Everest …
