Earth’s core may have started spinning in reverse

2023-01-24

The Earth’s core, a sphere the size of Pluto, has stopped rotating and may even have started to do it in the other direction, suggested this study, published this Tuesday in the journal “Nature Geoscience”.

This ‘planet on the planet’, essentially made of iron, about five thousand kilometers from the surface, has free movement, since it floats in the liquid envelope of the outer core.

The exact mechanism of this rotation continues to fuel debate. The little that is known is based on the analysis of seismic waves, caused by Earth tremors, when they pass through the center of the planet.

By analyzing these waves over the past 60 years, Xiaodong Song and Yi Yang of Peking University concluded that the core’s rotation “almost stopped in 2009, before restarting in the opposite direction.”