Sometimes the headlines are just so terrible we need to take a pause and carefully state that no, studies have not shown the world stopped turning.
Today’s mini-Moment of Science… About those “The Core Is Melting Down We’re All Gonna Die” headlines.
“Earth’s inner core may have stopped turning and could go into reverse, study suggests.” That’s the CNN headline. They had a real physics professor on to explain this shit, and he… certainly spoke some words.
Vice had a nearly identical headline, but they reassuringly added a subheader of “This isn’t as scary as it sounds, promise!” The journalistic integrity that it takes to herald in doomsday with an ‘lol jk’ is almost impressive. Almost.
“Earth’s core seems to be slowing its spin” suggests WaPo, which benefits from being less alarming but barely less wrong.
“Multidecadal variation of the Earth’s inner-core rotation,” is the title of the article published in Nature Geoscience last month. It’s accurate but about as helpful as the Vice bullshit.
Before we get into the business, a word about studying the Earth’s core. The deepest pit that’s ever been plumbed into this planet was the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a Soviet project that kicked off in 1970. The project was forced to a halt due to technical issues. The temperature and pressure was much higher than expected. They were “only” at a depth of 7.5 miles below the surface, about ⅓ of the way through the crust when the project was ended. Those hard earned miles took nearly twenty years.
About another 3,100 miles beneath your feet is the inner core, a solid ball composed mainly of iron and nickel. To observe what’s happening beneath thousands of miles of rock, magma, and hot liquid fuck you, seismic waves can be used. Even then, the data can be up for interpretation.
So what do the seismic rumblings tell us? Certainly not that the core has stopped or reversed, don’t be fucking ridiculous.
However, research back in the 1990s proposed that the core was rotating faster than the crust. Having the slightest smidge of autonomy of movement from the crust within the Earth’s fluid outer core, data suggested it was zipping along at one degree per year faster than the crust. Note, we typically rotate a full 360 degrees in a day, so one bonus degree in a year is not exactly the making of a plot for a sci-fi movie.
Despite the headlines, no interpretation of data in the latest study dares suggest the center of the Earth has stopped or reversed. Rather, it’s gone from a smidge faster than the crust to just a smidge slower. Yes, this is the planetary core equivalent of a car that was going 70mph slowing down to 68mph while up here at the surface, we’re going the sex number.
The newest study proposes that the winner of this ‘we’re not racing but we’re racing’ game changes in seven decade periods. Other models predict a 20-30 year cycle, and research published just last year predicted a relatively zippy cycle of six years.
The only thing I’ve gathered for sure from this data is that more data is needed.
This has been your Moment of Science, recommending against nuking the core of this or any other planet in our solar system.
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