The generally accepted idea in science was, until recently, that a huge ball of iron alloy is located in the Earth’s core. While scientists always laughed at skeptics who were saying that “you never went to the center of the Earth to know for sure what is there,” there is some truth in such statements.
No, nobody has ever gone to the center of the Earth. And second, thanks to new research that LiveScience.com tells us about, the Earth’s core is not just composed of iron as previously thought.
More diversity than believed
The new study suggests that the kernel of the Earth is pretty hard to define since its structure ranges from being hard to partly soft and even to liquid metal.
Jessica Irving, who is a seismologist from the University of Bristol in England, and also not a member of the study, declared for Live Science:
The more that we look at it, the more we realize it’s not one boring blob of iron,
We’re finding a whole new hidden world.
Earthquakes generate seismic waves, and that’s where scientists found their inspiration. They are able to understand pretty much what happens in the interior of our planet by measuring the massive vibrations. These waves are of two main types: straight-line compressional as well as undulating shear.
Apart from the recent study, scientists confirmed more than three years ago that the core of the Earth also contains liquid metal manifested as nitrogen.
There have been a lot of studies regarding how the kernel of the Earth is and is not, and we can only be eager to find out about new ones arriving in the near future. It’s remarkable that even today, scientists still have a lot more to learn about both our planet’s interior and exterior.
