Earth’s core has failed and is growing faster than Brazil under Indonesia

Think of the earth as geographic Tootsie pop.

If you look at the center of the planet more than 3,000 miles below your feet, a solid solid iron ball will be about three-quarters the size of the moon. The ball of iron is the inner center, and is located inside the outer center of the planet’s liquid.

The inner core is always growing: pieces of molten iron in the outer core add a millimeter each year and harden into iron crystals. Even though the temperature in the inner core is high enough to melt iron, the deep pressure inside the planet prevents the crystals from melting – representing the hard packing of ice.

But according to a recent study in the journal Nature Geoscience, the inner center grows in isolation. The eastern half of the globe, the eastern part of Indonesia’s Banda Sea, contains 60% more iron crystals than its western half under Brazil.

“The west side looks different from the east side to the center all the way,” said Daniel Frost, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the new study. In release. “The only way we can explain is that one side is growing faster than the other.”

Asymmetrical growth in the middle

Although Earth is more than 4 billion years old, its inner core is younger – geologists suspect it was formed half a billion to 1.5 billion years ago, when pieces of molten iron first began to crystallize from the outer core.

The Frost team developed a computer model that monitored the growth of the deep core over the past billion years. They discovered that the center had begun its failure as soon as it was formed.

Of course, if one half has been growing faster than the other for a long time, the inner center shape should no longer be round. But not like that. Frost and his colleagues therefore suggested that gravity could compensate for the asymmetrical growth by pushing excess crystals from the east side of the center to its west side, thereby helping the nucleus maintain a spherical body.

Frost’s team doesn’t know why iron crystals form uniformly in the inner core, but the answer, he says, could be in the layers above it — in the outer core and mantle, tectonic plates of hot rock floating 1,800 miles thick.

“Every layer of the earth is controlled by the people above it and affects the people below it,” Frost said Told Live Science.

If the iron crystallizes faster on one side of the inner core than the other, it means that the outer core is cooling faster on that side. Therefore, the shield on that side must cool the outer center faster than the shield on the other side.

Frost said the origin of the cooling chain could be from Earth’s tectonic plates. When one plate pushes against another, one is supported under the other, or sinks. The subdivision plates cool the shield in that part of the planet.

The growth of the missing center can affect the earth’s magnetic field

The Earth’s core plays an important role in protecting the planet from wind and harmful solar radiation. Spiral Iron in the middle outside outer Creates a magnetic field that extends from there into the space around our planet.

Due to the process by which hot, lighter material rises into the upper mantle from the outside, the rotation is partially accomplished. There, it replaces space with cold, dense mantle material, which sinks to the center below. This is called convection.

Convection occurs between the inner and outer centers, so if different parts of the outer and inner centers cool at different rates, it can affect how much heat is exchanged at the boundary – which could impact the vortex engines that protect the earth.

“The question is, will this change the strength of the magnetic field?” Snow Told Live Science.

For now, his team isn’t sure, but Frost says he’s investigating the response.

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