Observatory Sheet: Located 3,200 miles below the Earth’s surface, our planet’s inner core is a ball-shaped mass composed mostly of iron responsible for the Earth’s magnetic field. A new study suggests that this inner core is, in fact, an array of liquid, soft and solid structures that vary across 150 miles of mass, according to study leader Rhett Butler, a geophysicist at the University of Hawaii. According to “Russia Today”. In the 1950s, researchers suggested that the inner core is solid, as opposed to the area of liquid metal around it. “Seismology, illuminating earthquakes in the crust and upper mantle, observed by seismic observatories on the Earth’s surface, provides the only direct way to examine the inner core and its processes,” Butler explained. or break depending on the minerals and the temperature and density of that layer. To better understand the features of Earth’s inner core, Butler and co-author Seiji Tsuboi, a research scientist at the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, used data from seismometers directly corresponding to the site where the earthquake originated. Scientific models indicate the presence of contiguous regions of hard, soft, and liquid or soft iron alloys in the upper 150 miles of the inner core. “This puts new constraints on the formation, thermal history, and evolution of the Earth,” Butler explained. The researchers noted that this discovery of the diverse structure of the inner core might provide important new information regarding the dynamics at the boundaries between the inner and outer core, which affect the Earth’s magnetic field. “Knowing this frontier state from seismology may enable better predictive models of the geomagnetic field that sustains and protects life on our planet,” Butler said.
