10 ms·
Earth’s innermost layer is a 644 kilometer wide ball of iron, new study finds
- napolux 4y agoi wanna touch it
- irrational 4y agoI saw a documentary about people that did just that. It was called The Middle, or something like that.
- titaniumtown 4y ago...they touched the core of the earth?
- flatiron 4y agoi thought you are going to say "the core"!
- beeforpork 4y agoDo you want to go there or do you want it to come to you?
- kloch 4y agoAre you sure? It's about the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. That means if you could see it, it would also be as white hot as the Sun seen from Space.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoThis article shows the layers of the Earth as being perfectly spherical, like the oblate spheroid that is the top layer of Earth's crust. Little 8km high Everest mountain ranges or 8km deep Mariana trenches are peach fuzz on the 12,750 km diameter billiard ball, and I suppose it seems reasonable to assume that the mantle and core beneath are similarly shaped by gravity to near-perfect spheroids. But I recently learned about the African and Central Pacific mantle plumes, which rise far above the circles in those Pac-man renderings: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/seismic-mystery-underneath-africa-and-pacific/604729/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/seismic-... I expect that's old news to someone in the field, but I haven't thought critically about that diagram since high school.
- itronitron 4y agoI don't know why, but it took me a full minute to realize that graphic was spinning in a counter-clockwise fashion.
- dylan604 4y agoWhat would you expect for a planet where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?
- bregma 4y agoA plane, like the Earth, with the sun appearing and disappearing over the edge.
- dylan604 4y agosee, the flat earthers have it all wrong, which is evident by this comment. clearly, it is the sun that is traveling around the earth. i mean, if it disappeared, it wouldn't be coming back. so at least my theory is much more logical. and mars just likes to screw with us by reversing course a couple of times just to see if we're paying attention
- int_19h 4y agoIt's a different sun every day, duh.
- itronitron 4y agoI think because the continents fade out as they approach the point closest to the viewer it makes it look like they are actually fading into the background and behind the red blobby thingies.
- jobigoud 4y agoI wonder if people in the southern hemisphere think of it as rotating clockwise?
- nerdponx 4y agoWait, I definitely remember reading about this in science magazines years ago: the earth's core is more like solid than liquid because it's under tremendous pressure from gravity, and it's spinning, and it's iron, which is why Earth has a magnetic field. Is the new discovery that there is actually a fifth layer, which is solid, and that what we previously thought of as the "core" is actually liquid and not the innermost layer?
- hydrogen7800 4y agoThis reminds me of a paradox in my understanding of gravity. I often read about the pressure inside the earth resulting from the mass above, but the gravitational force inside a spherical shell is zero [0], and the only force acting at a given radius from the center is the mass of the sphere inside that radius. [0]http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshell2.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshel...
- oneshtein 4y agoSame effect is happening inside a black hole, thus each black hole must have a tiny hole inside, with it own event horizon, a bit similar to Arago Spot. :-/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cossatot 4y agoI believe the apparent paradox is that the 'net force' is not the same thing as pressure; it's basically the vector sum of pressure. Pressure in the Earth is an isotropic distribution of stresses, so that in a north-east-up coordinate system, the upward-pushing stress is matched by the downward-pushing stress, the eastward-pushing stress is matched by the westward-pushing stress, etc. So while these sum to zero in some sense, their magnitude is the density of the rock between the point and the surface times the depth times gravity. This is like going deeper in the ocean-the forces are equal in all directions, meaning that they sum to zero in some sense and there is no directional flattening or translation, but they still increase with depth.
- treeman79 4y agoHow big a ball of the rare but much heavier elements?
- kerpotgh 4y ago[dead]
- wincy 4y agoI’ve thought about this too, if dark matter is affected by gravity but not other forces, wouldn’t that mean if we were able to drill to the center of any substantial gravity well (say the moon rather than the earth), would we be able to detect a big clump of dark matter? Does that mean there’s a bunch of dark matter at the center of all the stars?
- pixl97 4y agoIf we assume dark matter is a particle that only reacts via gravity, well, I'm not so sure you will. The question here is how your particle that only reacts via gravity loses energy. First it will have whatever momentum it has from the galaxy relative to the speed of our solar system and planet. Then as it falls into our gravity well it picks up even more speed. When it reaches the center of our planet it's hauling ass with no brakes so no reason to stop, so it goes screeching out the other side. Even if you somehow had a dark matter particle at 0 relative motion to your gravity well before it fell in, how long is it going to take to bleed off its gravitational energy?
- autokad 4y agoI find the description of dark matter confusing. I hear statements like "dark matter has negligible interaction with ordinary matter". So, how do scientists know that dark matter exists? "The answer is that our galaxies spin too fast for the visible matter alone to hold them together. Dark matter, which makes up 27% of the universe, provides the additional gravitational force needed. In contrast, visible matter only makes up 5%." However, I'm left wondering whether dark matter does or doesn't interact significantly with visible matter.
- autokad 4y ago
- Footkerchief 4y agoActual study link https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2
- hoppla 4y agoEarth’s diameter is around 13000km, if there is an inner core with a 600 km width, you will find this core around 6000km below your feet, which is more than 1600 km below your feet (as the article correctly stated…)
- jmclnx 4y agoAnd if I was asked, I would have guessed it would have been around 1000km.
- jacquesm 4y agoYou'd have guessed from a horizontal position in that case.
- pmontra 4y agoYes, I also noticed it. It's too large a difference to be some miles to km conversion mistake. There is nothing 1600 km wide inside [1], not even the distance between the inner core and this new inner-inner core boundaries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core%E2%80%93mantle_boundary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core%E2%80%93mantle_boundary
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI do think conversion is involved in generating these odd figures somehow. May not be the sole part, but the figure in the title is definitely an conversion that's sprouted additional sigfigs. 644 km is 400,000 miles (within 0.04% error).
- mkl 4y agoTypo there: 400 miles. The actual paper's abstract [1] says "~650-km". In a skim through I didn't see anything that might correspond to the strange 1600km depth. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2
- adamwong246 4y agoIf only there were a decent way to mine the earth's core directly. There's more usable material already on Earth than the entire asteroid belt. It's just all melted together, molten and buried under thousands of miles of dirt.
- vatys 4y agoIf we started mining the earth’s core, it would seem infinite at first. Can we be trusted to only take a little bit and not eventually hollow it out?
- cossatot 4y agoIf we took the entire core to the surface (without collapsing the Earth which is impossible) we would cover the Earth with iron and nickel to a depth of hundreds of km.
- notfed 4y agoIf at some point we become anywhere advanced enough to do so, surely we could switch to mining other planets/objects.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoExactly! Plugging this into Wolfram Alpha reveals that Earth's core is worth $3.268×10^19 (US dollars)[1]. For comparison total global wealth is merely US$431T. 1. thirty-two quintillion six hundred eighty quadrillion dollars
- willis936 4y agoI bet it's worth more than that in usable electricity if we ran it through a heat exchanger + steam turbine.
- willis936 4y agoAlso, I finally got a workable link. Wolfram really fought me on this one and it shows the dimensionality incorrectly, but the number is correct. 32 trillion trillion dollars (3.2E25). So a hundred times more. Of course no market would hold a price when flooded with supply, but I bet our appetite for usable energy is higher than iron. That's a harder crystal ball estimation to quantify though. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28specific%20heat%20of%20iron%29%20%2A%20%284%2F3%2Api%2A%285100%20km%29%5E3%20%2A%20%28earth%27s%20core%2C%20density%29%20%2A%20%28%28earth%27s%20core%2C%20temperature%29%20-%20%28boiling%20point%20of%20water%29%29%20%2A0.3%20%2A%20%28price%20of%20electricity%20in%20%24%2FJ%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28specific%20heat%20of... Hard coded number sanity check: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.44%20J%20%2F%20%28g%20%2A%20K%29%29%20%2A%20%284%2F3%2Api%2A%285100%20km%29%5E3%20%2A%20%2810%20million%20g%20%2F%20m%5E3%29%20%2A%20%286000%20C%20-%20100%20C%29%20%2A0.3%20%2A%20%287.4E-6%20%24%2FJ%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.44%20J%20%2F%20%28...
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoNSFW link. I'm getting 2 large hentai ads. I hope they're not targeted haha
- mfer 4y agoYou don't have an ad blocker?
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoNope
- behringer 4y agoThe fbi recommends you get one
- brianwawok 4y agoAt least if you are the kind of person who is a target of Hentai ads
- adolph 4y agoI think they did that to delegitimize ad blockers.
- 867-5309 4y agothe fbi still knows you like hentai. the ad blocker just, well.. blocks the hentai ad
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoThe weird thing is I don't like hentai
- notJim 4y agoThis is a safe space, we aren't shaming you here
- anuptalwalkar 4y agoI saw a documentary recently about this, its called ‘Core’ where they build a ship to dive into the mantle to spin up this ball of iron using nukes. On a serious note, it’s amazing that we still have studies about this, and revising our knowledge!
- potamic 4y agoYou mean, a movie?
- xeromal 4y agoThey're taking the piss
- MarcoZavala 4y ago[dead]
- c256 4y agoNGL, I came here to get the link to make a _The Core_ joke to several friends…
- codethief 4y agoIs that a common joke/meme? I only found https://www.reddit.com/r/NetflixBestOf/comments/1p9vdb/the_core_amazing_documentary_about_the_true_story/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NetflixBestOf/comments/1p9vdb/the_c...
- evanb 4y agoTORQUE EQUALS R CROSS F!
- dheera 4y ago> latest research supports a theory that our blue planet holds an iron ball in the middle Uh, I thought my 6th grade teacher taught me this? What exactly is the "discovery"?
- Sharlin 4y agoYeah, it's a very poorly written article. The actual discovery seems to be that the solid inner core is divided into "outer" and "innermost" inner core, both of which solid iron-nickel but with somewhat different properties and a gradual transition between the layers.
- SllX 4y agoIs it me, or does 644 kilometers wide seem kind of small for the inner core of the Earth? Does it even stay in place then, or does it kind of drift around slightly within the outer core over time?
- blacksmith_tb 4y agoThat seems like a point of reference thing to me, presumably the iron core is denser than the molten layer around it, gravity is pulling that towards it, but it's all spinning, and there are other gravitational influences from the moon, the rest of the solar system, etc. which could cause some slight sloshing around, I'd bet.
- miga 4y agoWould love to see "new study" that actually finds something new.
- IncRnd 4y agoThis page is very rough and shouldn't be considered scientific. I didn't even find a link or the actual study name on the page. Not only that, Dr. Thanh-Son Pham is listed as a co-author but the page doesn't even mention the name of the second author, Hrvoje Tkalčić. I was able to find the home page for Dr. Thanh-Son Pham [1] and his google scholar page with his list of publications. [2] He looks extremely accomplished and a prolific researcher, especially for someone who appears to be so young. I was very impressed and can only think that others would have also liked to have a link to this paper. I found the actual paper online. [3] Abstract: Probing the Earth’s center is critical for understanding planetary formation and evolution. However, geophysical inferences have been challenging due to the lack of seismological probes sensitive to the Earth’s center. Here, by stacking waveforms recorded by a growing number of global seismic stations, we observe up-to-fivefold reverberating waves from selected earthquakes along the Earth’s diameter. Differential travel times of these exotic arrival pairs, hitherto unreported in seismological literature, complement and improve currently available information. The inferred transversely isotropic inner-core model contains a ~650-km thick innermost ball with P-wave speeds ~4% slower at ~50° from the Earth’s rotation axis. In contrast, the inner core’s outer shell displays much weaker anisotropy with the slowest direction in the equatorial plane. Our findings strengthen the evidence for an anisotropically-distinctive innermost inner core and its transition to a weakly anisotropic outer shell, which could be a fossilized record of a significant global event from the past. [1] https://sites.google.com/view/tsonpham/home https://sites.google.com/view/tsonpham/home [2] https://sites.google.com/view/tsonpham/publication https://sites.google.com/view/tsonpham/publication [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2
- mikeyouse 4y agoYeah it looks like that website just stole the text from CNN and omitted a bunch of it. CNN didn't interview the other authors, but at least their figures are properly attributed (all tagged with Drew Whitehouse/Son Phạm/Hrvoje Tkalčic -- Whitehouse apparently works for National Computational Infrastructure and did the visualizations)and they directly link to the study. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929145
- 4y ago
- hutzlibu 4y agoLayman question: why isn't the core of the earth made up of the most dense and heavy elements? One would assume, that they sink in to the deepest. But of course, there is also the spinning of the earth, that counters it and makes the heavier elements go outside?
- BurningFrog 4y agoYeah, I've heard that the heat from all the Uranium in the center is a big reason the core is still hot.
- hutzlibu 4y agoYes, that is kind of the question in my head: is the core of the earth basically a nuclear reactor? And if not, why not?
- evanb 4y agoIt's not a reactor because the radioactive elements are sparse enough that there's no chain reaction. It's more like an atomic battery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
- mikeyouse 4y agoIt's a weird article/website -- they just stole most of the text from CNN. Including a section where they say, "Geoscientists first suggested that Earth’s core might have an imperceptible extra layer about 20 years ago, according to a press release leaked to CNN News." There's no hint of who runs it/operates it -- is it some sort of auto-plagiarizer? The cribbed article is here: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/world/earths-core-iron-metallic-core-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/world/earths-core-iron-metall...
- NetOpWibby 4y agoThank you
- xjwm 4y agoInteresting that the core is oversized. 640Km should be enough for any body.
- magic_hamster 4y agoHuh. I was under the impression this was known for a long time. If I recall, this is how the Earth's magnetic field is explained. Edit: I should really read more comment before adding my own, shouldn't I?
- otikik 4y agoEarth. What an irony.
- throwaway81523 4y agoSite archyde.com seems to be some kind of weird splog. Is there a better source? What exactly is the new discovery, just that the innermost part of the core has a slightly different composition than the surrounding part?
- kazinator 4y ago"Detecting this new inner layer located more than 1600 km below our feet ..." Doesn't jibe with 644 km wide; unless the interpretation is "heck of a lot more than 1600 km below our feet".
- pard68 4y agoMight there be yet another core (YAC) inside of this new one? Seems that if this was hard to detect the next one will be all the more difficult to find.
- somat 4y agoMy current fun internet science quest it reading papers about how much iron is in the sun, or perhaps better said as how big is the iron core in the sun. this has been especially fun because the answers ranges from fractional percentages to most of it. The most of it theory says that the sun is a stellar remnant, but I think fusion would suffer if that were the case. The fractional percentage theory is based off of the observed spectra of the sun. The sizable iron core theory is based off of the observed atomic composition of the inner solar system. there are also missing neutrino observations that support this theory, that is, there are not enough observed neutrinos that match a hydrogen core but do match an iron core. Like I said a fun subject, I love it when an innocent question "How much iron is in the sun?" leads to such wildly different theories.
- djmips 4y agoWait.. what? Stellar remnant? I've never heard any talk at all that our sun is that far along in it's stellar evolution. Is that legitimate or some whacky stuff.
- saalweachter 4y agoIt is hard to tell until you read enough literature! That is the tricky part about following science as a layperson; a bad sample can give you a distorted view, leaving you thinking a fringe view not supported by the data is plausible or correct.
- somat 4y agoIt is a crank theory, untrue, but it goes. What happened to the core of whatever star exploded to form the gas cloud that formed the solar system, why would that core not be the gravitational locus of the new star.
- mr_toad 4y agoSupernovae spread mass over hundreds of light years. And then things start drifting apart. Whatever exploded to leave behind the mass that created the Earth and the Sun could be thousands of light years away.
- nico 4y agoJust like with ourselves. For our planet, thoroughly studying the inside of it will probably yield much more interesting results than looking always outside of it. Look forward to a lot more research about the inner workings of our planet.
- asim 4y agoSurely the earth's core is a magnet, hence gravitational forces and the ability to actually aggregate all this mass into a sphere and created it's only rotational force.
- moomoo11 4y agoDumb question but how come we have not yet drilled a hole to the center yet? I know it’s hot af even a few km down and the Russians tried to drill, but wouldn’t that be interesting and a good use of money? Who knows what resources we may actually find down there.
- eipie10 4y agoI think a 6000km vertically downward hole is very unstable and will collapse into itself. Any real feasible geometry would just require so much mass redistribution that it might significantly affect the planet's moment of inertia.
- crystaln 4y agoI feel like this is what I learned in grade school 35 years ago. I guess then it was just a theory?
- adrian_b 4y agoThe actual research paper (freely downloadable): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36074-2