Earth’s inner core stopped spinning. Is this the end?

The Earth’s inner core ceased to rotate. Until some unexpected activity, like an earthquake or a volcanic explosion, jolts us to our senses, few of us pay any thought to the churning, spinning contents of Earth.

But don’t worry, it’s not the first time such an incident has been recorded, so people shouldn’t worry and start looking for science fiction films and novels back 10 years ago that predicted such an event. The previous paradigm shift occurred in the early 1970s.

The image below should give you an idea about Earth’s inner core

Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik

The solid inner iron core of the Earth, which typically spins within a nearly frictionless molten outer shell, has recently been found to have come to a grinding halt by geoscientists. Geophysicists Yi Yang and Xiadong Song of Peking University in Beijing recently published a study in Nature Geoscience that examined the nature of movement of the Earth’s deep core, which is primarily composed of iron and molten liquids.

While it is impossible for scientists to directly observe the core, they can study the seismic waves that are produced as they approach the core by earthquakes and nuclear testing from the Cold War. Seismologists at Peking University in Beijing and study co-authors Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song accomplished that from their most recent study, which was released on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Yang and Song said that they discovered the inner core’s rotation appears to have “paused” between 2009 and 2020 and may even be reversing “by a modest amount” based on their examination of seismic waves produced by comparable earthquakes dating back to the 1960s.

How is this going to affect?

According to the researchers, variations in this rotation often correspond to variations in the “length of day,” or the precise period of time it takes for Earth to rotate on its axis. The length of the day and the magnetic field, are two geophysical variables that fluctuate together with the movement of the inner core.

Not only that. Global mean temperature and sea level rise trends over several decades also appear to strangely coincide.

There isn’t much evidence to imply that what happens inside the inner core currently has a significant impact on those of us who live on the surface.

However, the scientists insisted that they believed there to be physical linkages between every layer of the Earth, from its deepest interior to its surface as well as the movement of angular momentum from the core and mantle to the surface are both supported by these discoveries.