Earth’s inner core rotating slower

26th Jan 2023

myonlineprep

International

Earth’s inner core, a hot iron ball the size of Pluto, has stopped spinning faster than the planet’s surface and might now be rotating slower than it,research suggested.
Roughly 5,000 kilometres below the surface we live on, this “planet within the planet” can spin independently because it floats in the liquid metal outer core.
New research publishedin the journal Natural Geo science analysed seismic waves from repeating earthquakes over the last six decades.
“We believe the innercore rotates, relative to the Earth’s surface, back and forth, like a swing,” the study’s authors, Xiaodong Song and Yi Yang of China’s Peking University, said.
The inner core started rotating slightly faster than the rest of the planet in the early 1970s. But it had been slowing down before coming in sync with Earth’s rotation around 2009, it said.