EARTH’S INNERMOST LAYER

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Context

• Seismologists at The Australian National University believe they’ve documented evidence of a distinct fifth layer lurking underneath it — the “innermost inner core”.

Earlier Assumptions

• For the longest time since Danish scientist Inge Lehmann used seismic waves to discover Earth’s inner core in 1936, our rocky spheroidal planet was thought to have four layers: the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core.
• Earth’s inner core — which is about 70% the size of the Moon with a diameter of 2,440 km — was previously thought to be the hottest and densest of all four concentric layers. Its interaction with the 6,970 km-wide molten outer core drives convection currents — heat released from solidification— to create and maintain Earth’s magnetic field.
• Temperatures that far deep ought to be extreme, making this steaming cauldron of iron and nickel currently inaccessible.

New Findings

• New findings published in Nature Communications confirm the existence of a distinct fifth layer — a solid ball measuring 650 km across.
• This "innermost inner core" is an iron-nickel alloy ball.
• The scientists found the 'hidden' core by studying seismic waves that traveled back and forth across the Earth's entire diameter up to five times.
• The earthquake waves probed places near the center at angles that suggested a different crystalline structure inside the innermost layer. Effectively, the alloy is skewing the travel times for the waves as they pass through.

Significance

• The findings create room for further research — which could lay bare the mystery of how a major global event caused a significant change in its composition.
• This inner core is like a time capsule of Earth's evolutionary history — it's a fossilized record that serves as a gateway into the events of our planet's past [and hides information related to the] events that happened on Earth hundreds of millions to billions of years ago.

https://www.timesnownews.com/viral/earths-innermost-inner-core-may-be-hiding-its-solid-fifth-layer-article-98233454