When seismic waves travel through the body of our planet, they seem to travel 3% faster when moving vertically from pole to pole than horizontally from east to west.
According to the new models, this may be because the Earth’s hard core is growing faster on one side, under the Banda Sea, which is part of Indonesia’s territorial waters, and slower on the other side, under Brazil.
In the past, there was a time when our planet was not hard core. Earth’s deepest interior probably contained a mass of magma for billions of years before the liquid iron in the center began to cool and solidify, he is writing Gate Science Alert.
This means that the center of the Earth could be a giant, growing and crystallizing mass of iron, and when these crystals line up in a certain way, it is likely to allow seismic waves to move faster in some directions.
By triggering models of how this particular alignment occurs, researchers have come up with an unexpected explanation – the Earth’s inner core grows out of balance.
“The simplest model seemed a little unusual – that the inner core is asymmetric,” says global seismologist Daniel Frost of the University of California, Berkeley.
“The west side looks different from the east side all the way to the center, not just at the top of the inner core, as some have suggested. The only way we can explain this is that one side is growing faster than the other,” he said.
Since it’s impossible to research the Earth’s inner core to determine what’s really going on, it’s a prolific research area for debate.
Using various computer models representing the geodynamics of the Earth and the physics of iron minerals under high pressure and temperature, the researchers tried to find out why The inner core of our planet It is aligned in a specific way.
The simplest explanation is that the crystalline core of our planet is growing faster in the equator and precisely on the eastern side.
The study authors concluded, “This corresponds to a 40% lower growth rate at the poles and 130% higher at the equator than the global average.”
This asymmetric growth rate indicates that some parts Earth’s inner core They are warmer, while others are cooler, which allows for the formation of iron crystals faster.
Finally, the researchers showed that this motion, through gravity, aligns the crystal structure of Earth’s inner core along our planet’s rotation axis.
