The Earth's Core is Slowing Down and Now Spinning in the Opposite Direction: What Does This Mean?

The Earth's core is slowing down and now spinning in the opposite direction. What does this mean? The rotation of the Earth's core has changed, and scientists are wondering what could be causing it. Do we have anything to fear?

The Earth's core is the central part of our planet. Scientists know very little about the core, which remains one of the greatest mysteries of the universe to this day. It is known that it is made of solid metals surrounded by a liquid shell and rotates independently of the Earth's rotation. A recent study showed that the core began to behave strangely.

Scientists have long suspected that both the speed and direction of the Earth's core's rotation have changed significantly in recent years. A recent paper published in the "Nature" confirmed these assumptions. The Earth's core is spinning slower and in a different direction than before.

To understand this, a group of researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) studied seismological waves from earthquakes passing through the inner core since 1964. According to them, the rotation of the core affects the arrival time of the waves. They selected 121 locations where the waves were caused by earthquakes in the same places around the world but at different times, to capture the rate of rotation of the core in different years. The data showed that during the cycle, the rotation of the core slows down and speeds up at different rates, which is also a mystery. If the calculations are correct, the speed should start to increase in about 10 years. The apparent slowdown in the core's rotation, which began around 2010, may be due to the constant motion of the liquid iron outer core that generates Earth's magnetic field or to gravitational attraction. Exactly what these changes mean is not yet known.

Speed changes, reversals, and vibrations of the inner core are not uncommon, so scientists are convinced that there is no proof that an apocalyptic catastrophe awaits us. However, they believe that this change in the rotation of the core could change the length of our days, but only by a few fractions of a second. "It would be very difficult to notice it, in a thousandth of a second, almost lost in the noise of the moving oceans and atmosphere," said one of the scientists.