Researchers from the ANU (Australian National University) say they managed to discover that the Earth has another core inside, the deepest so far known. It would be “solid metallic ball” which would be inside the inner core.
In this way, the Earth would have five terrestrial layers; Until now only the crust, mantle, outer core, and inner core. This fifth layer would be in the center of the inner core, the agency reported. Europa Press.
The research data came from seismic waves caused by earthquakes. “The existence of an inner metallic ball within the inner core, the innermost core, was posited as hypothesis regarding 20 years ago. We now bring another line of evidence to prove the hypothesis,” reported Dr Thanh-Son Pham, from the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Sciences.
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In turn, Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic, who also works at the ANU, announced that by studying this new layer, more information might emerge from the past and the evolution of planet Earth.
“This inner core is like a time capsule of Earth’s evolutionary history: it’s a fossilized record which serves as a gateway to the events of our planet’s past. Events that occurred on Earth hundreds of millions or billions of years ago,” he commented.
How they came to the discovery of “the fifth layer of the Earth”
The specialists observed the seismic waves that travel through the center of the Earth and end up on the opposite side of the planet where an earthquake occurs. Those same waves then return to the center. Compare this situation with the bounce of a ping pong ball.
In that sense, Dr. Pham, explained: “By developing a technique to augment the signals recorded by densely populated networks of seismographs, we have observed, for the first time, seismic waves that bounce back and forth up to five times along the diameter of the Earth. Previous studies had only documented a single rebound antipodal. The findings are exciting because they provide a new way to probe Earth’s inner core and its most central region.”
It is that one of the earthquakes studied (they analyzed regarding 200 of magnitude 6 or higher in the last decade) was one originating in Alaska, whose seismic waves actually “bounced” in the South Atlantic, to then return to Alaska.
the core of the earth
The interior of the inner core of the Earth is composed of an alloy of iron and nickel. And researchers study how seismic waves speed up or slow down through the inner core material and depending on the direction in which they travel.
Thus, they were able to deduce that the crystallized structure of the innermost region of the inner core is probably different from that of the outer shell.
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And another of the data that the investigation yielded suggests that the Earth had at some point a “great global event” that caused a “significant” change in the crystal structure or texture of the inner core.
“There are still many unanswered questions regarding Earth’s innermost core, which might hold the secrets to unlocking the mystery of our planet’s formation,” concluded Professor Tkalcic.
ED
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