The study confirms that the rotation of the inner core of the Earth is slowing down, it began to decrease in…

This change could potentially affect the rotation of the planets, leading to longer days.

Scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) have confirmed that the inner core of the Earth is rotating more slowly than the surface of the planet. The groundbreaking research raises important questions about planetary mechanics and could have a significant effect on both the stability of Earth’s magnetic field and the length of our days. Scientific alert reported.

The study published in Nature provides evidence that the inner core began to slow down around 2010, marking the first time in about 40 years that it is moving slower than Earth’s mantle. In particular, the inner core – a super-hot, super-dense sphere of iron and nickel – lies over 4,800 km below our feet.

For the study, John Vidale and his colleagues analyzed readings from 121 repeated earthquakes recorded between 1991 and 2023 around the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic. They also used data from Soviet nuclear tests conducted between 1971 and 1974, as well as French and American nuclear tests from other studies of the inner core.

”When I first saw the seismograms that hinted at this change, I was amazed. But when we found two dozen other observations that signaled the same pattern, the result was inescapable. The inner core had slowed for the first time in many decades. Other scientists have recently argued for similar and different models, but our latest study provides the most compelling solution,” said Mr. Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Mr Vidale explained that the slowing of the inner core’s rotation is caused by the turbulent motion of the surrounding liquid outer core, which generates the Earth’s magnetic field, and gravitational pulls from dense regions in the rocky mantle.

This could eventually change the rotation of the entire planet, lengthening our days. Mr Vidale said the recoil of the inner core can change the length of a day by fractions of a second: “It’s very hard to notice, on the order of a thousandth of a second, almost lost in the noise of the oceans and the atmosphere that shock.

The team now wants to describe the trajectory of the inner core in even greater detail to find out exactly why it is shifting. “The dance of the inner core may be even more vibrant than we know so far,” Mr Vidale said.