2023-10-06 04:00:07
Long considered a solid sphere, the Earth’s inner core is actually much more flexible than previously thought. A new study suggests that this flexibility might be due to overactive atoms.
Image: Argonne National Laboratory / Flickr / CC 2.0
The inner core of the Earth is a huge metallic sphere, mainly composed of iron. , with a diameter (In a circle or a sphere, the diameter is a line segment passing through the center…) of approximately 1,220 kilometers (The meter (symbol m, from the Greek metron, measurement) is the basic unit of length of the System…). It is surrounded by the outer core, a sea of liquid metals, which is itself enveloped by the mantle, a layer of rock (Rock, from the popular Latin rocca, designates any material constituting the bark…) in fusion (In physics and metallurgy, fusion is the passage of a body from the solid state to the state…). The pressure at the Earth’s core is colossal, leading experts to think that the core must be completely automatic, or even by anglicism completion or…) solid.
However, seismic waves in 2021 revealed irregularities in the inner core, calling it a “hidden and soft world”. Later studies suggested that this softness might be due to swirls of liquid iron trapped inside the core or to a state of “superionic”.
Jung-Fu Lin, researcher, presents a model of the hexagonal network of atoms (from the Greek ατομος, atomos, “that the we cannot…) iron from the inner core.
Crédit: Jung-Fu Lin / UT Jackson School of Geosciences
The recent study, published in the journal Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, offers an alternative explanation. The researchers recreated the intense pressure of the inner core, called a “supercell”, in the laboratory and observed the behavior of the iron atoms. They then used this data to create a computer simulation.
The results suggest that atoms inside the inner core may move around much more than previously thought, said Jung-Fu Lin, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin.
A simulation shows how groups of iron atoms move around the “supercell”.
Crédit: Jung-Fu Lin / UT Jackson School of Geosciences
The simulation of the supercell shows that some of these atoms can move in groups, changing place in the network without altering its overall structure. This type of movement is called “collective movement”. According to Jung-Fu Lin, this increased mobility makes the inner core less rigid in the face of shear forces, which might explain its surprising flexibility.
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