How we think about our planet's center may need to be seriously updated.
New evidence suggests that, instead of consistently rotating faster than Earth's spin, the solid inner core oscillates – spinning first in one direction with respect to the surface far above, then the other, changing direction every six years.
Researchers first detailed this phenomenon in 1996, with an estimated superrotation rate of 1 degree per year. Vidale and his colleague, Wei Wang, also of UCLA, later revised the rate down to 0.29 degrees per year, using data from underground nuclear tests conducted at the Russian Novaya Zemlya testing site in the 1970s.
"The idea the inner core oscillates was a model that was out there, but the community has been split on whether it was viable,""We went into this expecting to see the same rotation direction and rate in the earlier pair of atomic tests, but instead we saw the opposite. We were quite surprised to find that it was moving in the other direction."
Earth's days undergo time variations of plus or minus 0.2 seconds every six years or so, too, and Earth's magnetic field. In amplitude and phase, they match the periodicity of the model Vidale and Wang derived for the oscillations of Earth's inner core.
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