Scientists find oddly behaving 'inner-inner core' at Earth's center

Excerpt from cnet.com


Though the seismic waves from earthquakes are best known for their

destructive abilities, in the hands of geologists, they can be powerful

tools of discovery. A research team at the University of Illinois (UI)

has just used the rumbles from quakes to more closely examine the core

of our planet, and what they found there was quite a surprise. It seems

our Earth’s core has another core that measures about half the diameter

of the original core.

What demarcates this “inner-inner core” is

that the iron crystals it contains are oriented on an east-west axis,

unlike the iron crystals in the “outer-inner core” which organize along a

north-south axis.

“The fact that we have

two regions that are distinctly different may tell us something about

how the inner core has been evolving,” said Xiaodong Song,

a professor of geology at UI who, along with visiting postdoctoral

researcher Tao Wang, led the team responsible for the discovery. “For

example, over the history of the Earth, the inner core might have had a

very dramatic change in its deformation regime. It might hold the key to

how the planet has evolved. We are right in the center — literally,

the center of the Earth.”

The researchers’ findings were published in the journal Nature yesterday.

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Scientists find oddly behaving 'inner-inner core' at Earth's center