WASHINGTON: In Jules Verne's classic 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, adventurers descend through an Icelandic volcano into a vast underground world populated by prehistoric creatures as they explore our planet's interior. The actual centre of the Earth is nothing like this fanciful depiction - and in
Researchers on Tuesday said an intensive study of Earth's deep interior, based on the behavior of seismic waves from large earthquakes, confirmed the existence of a distinct structure inside our planet's inner core - a wickedly hot innermost solid ball of iron and nickel about 1,350km wide.
Earthquakes unleash seismic waves that travel through the planet and can reveal the contours of its interior structure based on the changing shape of the waves. Until now, scientists were able to detect these waves bouncing up to twice, from one side of Earth to the other and then back. The new research studied waves from 200 quakes with magnitudes above 6.0 ricocheting like ping pong balls up to five times within the planet.
The inner core's outer shell and its newly confirmed innermost sphere both are hot enough to be molten but are a solid iron-nickel alloy because the incredible pressure at the center of the Earth renders it a solid state. The transition from the outer part of the inner core to the innermost sphere appears to be gradual rather than a sharp boundary, Pham said. The researchers were able to differentiate the two regions because the seismic waves acted differently between them.
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