Submitted by BayRunner t3_10jpa0r in askscience
I was reading an article today on studies that may show the inner core spinning at different rates over time than the crust. If I understand Newton’s laws correctly, if scientists that believe the inner core rotational speed has changed, what forces would be at play to impact the core’s change (slower and faster)?
Wouldn' friction with outer layers be a factor here?
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The sun. Electromagnetic forces of our nearest massive fusion generation body are very strong and affect all kinds of things in our planet including earthquakes, weather, and... Rotation speed.
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Does the extraction of oil take the lubricant out of the equation?
Like, human extraction of oil? No, we don’t dig up anything that isn’t sitting in the crust of the earth. The mantle, sitting between the crust and the outer core, is something around 75x thicker than the crust. We have no impact on what happens to the core.
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What forces keep the core molten as it is? (I think)
Also is the heat dissipating? If so I'm sure the heat lost is close to the heat generated by whichever forces because the Earth has been hot & "hot as a mf" on the inside for so long.
Lol sorry & thanks, wouldn't bother a whole post, but seemed like you may know or be able to point me to a good set of terms to search to understand this better.
Core is molten for two reasons:
Initial formation of Earth generated a lot of thermal energy, because a lot of stuff smashed together
Continued decay of radioisotopes has contributed additional thermal energy-- without this, the core would have cooled by now
Thermal energy is lost from the core through heat transfer to the mantle, which brings it to the crust by way of convection; this is what ultimately causes plate movement, earthquakes, volcanism, subduction, etc. on Earth. Once the core is cool enough that mantle convection stops, tectonic forces will subside and uplift processes will cease. From that point, weathering and erosion will gradually erase all land above sea level, giving us an ocean planet. I think the Sun will be hot enough to boil our oceans well before that happens, though (solar brightening over geologic time).
So if the oceans boil away, will the earth just become a smooth marble of rock with a bunch of fog over it?
Think more "mars-scape, marscape?", as the core also gives us our magnetic field that protects our atmosphere from the solar winds. Once the core cools, the Earth's internal dynamo also slows, solar winds start buffeting our atmosphere out of Earth's gravitational field, and we start looking more like Mars.
Also scheduled to happen around the same geologic time as the Earth being swallowed / burned by the Sun.
> swallowed
The version I heard was the expanding sun loses mass leaving Earth beyond its grasp.
> swallowed / burned
So its changed again, having become uncertain.
and even that is ignoring options for stellar engineering (assuming our descendants even care)
Yeah, several "what's gonna happen in unfathomable timescale" options to choose from.
>sun loses mass leaving Earth beyond its grasp
This is incorrect. The Suns expansion does not equate to mass loss. Cosmologically its mass will have not decreased that much (which is what will determine where Earths orbit is) but it'll be fusing helium into carbon which is a hotter more energetic process and so the outer layers of the star will get pushed out and the star expands. Earths orbit won't change much however the Suns radius will expand to near or fully envelop Earth.
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The core is molten because it's hot and under high pressure. Essentially, the Earth was very hot and it's cooling down.
In fact, the size of the solid part, i.e. the Inner Core, continuously increases.
Aren't there continuous nuclear reactions also that help keep the heat going? Likely caused by the pressure.
Nuclear reactions happening in the Earth are all radioactive decays. These produce heat, and it's in fact the main contribution (I've written another comment here with a bit more detail) but most of it happens in the continental Crust and in the Mantle.
This nuclear process is not generally dependent on pressure, in fact it mainly happens in the external layers of our planet. The distribution of radiogenic heat depends on where the element that may undergo beta-decay are located. If you are curious, the main elements responsible for this on Earth are Uranium, Thorium and Potassium.
Despite there being large uncertainty, geochemical studies show that these element are not much soluable in the liquid core. Radioactive decay contributes to the heat production in the core for 0.2 TW, while the the total amount of heat produced by the core is around 10-15 TW.
EDIT: well, not all nuclear reactions in the earth are decays. A few occurrences of natural fission reactions have been found, where particular conditions, like more abundance of a certain uranium isotope and different amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, made the fission reactions possible. The only few occurrences known happened in the far geological past in Oklo (region of Gabon).
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Not caused by the pressure (that's what stars do and the Earth isn't one) but rather the heat of radioactive decay. It's also believed that tidal forces from the Moon create some heat.
Thank you.
Heat retained from the formation of the earth, and compressive forces.
Insulation from the thick layers above.
Tidal heating - Continual squeezing and squashing of earths core by the moon orbiting around the earth. Though note that this doesn't occur with moons that are tidally locked.
Having a relatively warm surface from heating by the sun and thick atmosphere, though this is of lesser effect than say Venus. By having a warmer surface, the temperature differential is lessened, so less thermal energy moves across the gradient.
By far the two major sources of heat are primordial heat and radioactive decay. Changes in pressure can cause changes in temperature, but largely static pressure with depth does not generate heat. Tidal heating is not relevant for the Earth (though it's important for other planetary bodies in the solar system).
I'm confused. Are either of these processes related to the pressure of the mass above? I always thought that was what caused the heat. Two more questions. 1. Is radioactive decay triggered by something or does it just happen with those particular elements? 2. Is there something besides the insulating qualities of the crust that keep primordial heat from cooling quicker. Billions of years seems like a long time for something to cool down. I know it is a lot of mass but......
> Are either of these processes related to the pressure of the mass above? I always thought that was what caused the heat.
No. The mass above plays a role in the sense that it dictates the rates of heat transfer toward the surface from a given depth, but the fact that it's under pressure does not directly generate heat. There are various depth/pressure/temperature related processes that occur, specifically phase transitions at specific depth/pressure/temperature ranges that do change heat content, e.g., the 660 transition is characterized by an endothermic reaction and thus does contribute to the total heat budget.
> 1. Is radioactive decay triggered by something or does it just happen with those particular elements?
Radioactive decay, and its rate, is an intrinsic property of a given isotope. There is abundant literature and details on radioactive decay, but generally speaking, for a given isotope (e.g., ^(238)U, which is one that is relevant for the question), the "rate" of decay is actually a reflection that there is a fixed probability that any given 238 atom will decay, and given an arbitrarily large group of 238 atoms, we can consider this as a rate of decay.
> Is there something besides the insulating qualities of the crust that keep primordial heat from cooling quicker.
Insulating qualities of the entire planet, i.e., rock is not a great conductor, the relative inefficiency of radiation as a heat transfer mechanism (i.e., how heat is ultimately transferred out of the solid Earth), and the radioactive decay all play an important role. For the last bit, it's not just that radioactive decay is adding heat, but also in doing so, it's effectively slowing down the rate of heat loss. Broadly speaking, the rate of heat transfer is related to the gradient in temperature. Thus a reduced gradient (because the interior stays warmer) means that the rate of heat transfer is less. Things get more complicated as we have to think about convective heat transfer in the outer core and mantle, but broadly this point remains true.
Thank you.
Earth and the moon are tidally locked aren't they? Interesting answers here and I actually had some keywords to use too lol thank you.
The moon is tidally locked so it always faces the earth, but the earth doesn't always face the moon. It rotates unequally to how the moon orbits. There is also drift between the number of orbits and the ultimate position the moon ends up in a year. One month is roughly equal to a lunar month, but not exactly.
Have you ever felt a spray bottle get colder as you release the pressurised gas/content?
In Earth's core it's the other way around. High pressure makes the core hot. The high pressure itself is from the mass of the kilometers of dirt and stone and water etc.
releasing pressure makes something get colder. increasing pressure makes it get hotter.
so where is the increase in pressure coming from that keeps the core hot?
what actually keeps the core hot is radioactive decay on unstable isotopes
You're confusing the Joule-Thomsom effect with a fundamental law.
It only applies to most gases at standard conditions, whereas liquids generally heat up as they are expanded.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule%E2%80%93Thomson_effect
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Gravity causes the pressure. It’s the weight of everything above pressing down, which naturally increases the deeper you go.
But its a static pressure isn't it?
Otherwise something highly compressed would radiate heat indefinitely which ain't going to happen.
Yes, somewhat, there are fluctuations but mainly the earth is hot, it was heated by the pressure, and is now cooling down.
> Otherwise something highly compressed would radiate heat indefinitely which ain't going to happen.
Sure, the earth is cooling down. The mantle however is a reasonably good insulating layer though (mostly because it's so damn thick). The heat loss is is estimated at 47±2 TW (or about 3 times to total energy usage by humans). Still, the Earth will be destroyed by the Sun before it cools down.
Sure, I agree with all of that.
>Gravity causes the pressure. It’s the weight of everything above pressing down, which naturally increases the deeper you go which really isn't the case as no work is being done.
I just read the above as suggesting that a static pressure will result in an increase in temp.
The relationship between temperature and pressure does not work the way you are describing. A substance is not at a given temperature just because it is at a given pressure. Pressurize one cylinder of nitrogen to 30PSI, and another cylinder of nitrogen to 3000PSI. Leave them alone in a room for awhile, and they will both become room temperature.
The temperature of a given mass is not dependent on its static pressure, but on changes to its pressure.
You are (effectively) arguing that adiabatic heating is responsible for the heat of the earth's core. To make this argument, you will have to show that the earth's volume is shrinking, or otherwise demonstrate that the pressure at the core is not just high, but increasing.
Without a pressure change, we need to look at the heat entering or exiting the system. The simple fact is that relative to the total amount of heat within them, very little heat actually leaves the core and mantle. At the current rate of dissipation, it will take billions of years to remove a significant amount of that heat.
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Following the analogy... Isn't it so that the earth was pressurised to a tremendous amount of psi, and is now in that process of cooling down to ambient temperature?
Of course many other processes play a role, but the pressurised can analogy kind of works if you scale it up?
I don't know if adiabatic processes are responsible for the temperatures in the core, but if it is, it would be more accurate to describe this in the past tense, rather than the present tense that the other commenter used:
>"High pressure makes made the core hot"
You made the same distinction:
>the earth was pressurised
That being said, I doubt adiabatic heating plays a significant role. Adiabatic processes operate through compression, not pressurization.
Suppose I have a sealed tank of water. I put a balloon inside it. Then I pressurize the water to double the pressure in the tank. The volume of the balloon shrinks.
Here's the important part: Even though the balloon is half the size now, it still has the same amount of heat: none has entered or exited yet. The same amount of heat in a smaller volume means the temperature has risen. That's adiabatic heating.
Replace the balloon with an iron or nickel ball. When you double the pressure, the volume of the ball doesn't change. Increase the pressure a hundred times, a thousand times, it doesn't matter: the volume of the ball stays the same. The heat within the ball is not concentrated. There is no adiabatic process involved.
With the core of the earth being primarily comprised of non-compressible materials, I don't think adiabatic heating explains the temperature of the core.
> the pressurised can analogy kind of works if you scale it up?
It did 4 billion years ago when the debris in our Sun's accretion disk coalesced to form our planet, and again when whatever planet sized object hit us to form our Moon, but since then we've been cooling off like a pot of old coffee. Fortunately there's a lot of mass left to cool off, and it's stored in the best Thermos ever created...
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The increase of pressure occurred billions of years ago when the Earth was originally formed from the cloud of gas and dust accumulated in a disc around the early Sun.
The collisions between particles created a lump that started attracting more and more particles and dust and larger debris pieces. As the mass increased, gravity also increased and each layer started to push on the layer under it with increasing weight. Eventually the force of gravity was strong enough to slowly deform the core of the object, until the proto-Earth reached a state called hydrostatic equilibrium.
In English this means the object was now big enough that it formed into a sphere under its own weight. This shape change caused a lot of heat through friction, and of course the Earth was not yet done growing.
As the planet grew and the pressure within increased, the core started to melt, which meant that heavy elements sunk into the core. However, eventually the planet grew so big that the pressure at the core actually started to solidify the iron and nickel there.
This is how Earth ended up with a solid iron-nickel inner core, surrounded by a thick layer of outer core which is also mostly iron and nickel, but in liquid phase.
So, the pressure increase that caused the Earth's core to heat up originally occurred billions of years ago when the planet was forming.
Currently, it's believed that some of Earth's core heat is still residual or "primordial" heat from the formation of the planet, and the rest is from tidal forces generated by the Moon, or heat from radioactive decay of active isotopes.
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The core's main heat source comes from radioactive decay of elements leftover from planetary formation, not from pressure.
In reality, geochemical studies suggest that radiogenic heat plays a small role in the energy balance of the core. Cooling and phase transition are the main processes.
The part where radioactive decay is the main heat source is the mantle.
To what extent is it kept warm simply by heat retention from primordial times and the formation of the earth? As in, how does the thermal energy generated by the core/mantle over the past few billion years compare to the thermal energy lost and the thermal energy it started out with when the planet was a mostly molten blob?
I guess to simplify the question, I'm curious whether, in the absence of radioactive decay in the mantle, we'd be another Mars right now.
The main heat sources in the core are secular cooling (i.e. losing primordial heat), latent heat due to the ongoing solidification of the inner region, compositional energy (essentially gravitational energy, the lighter elements in the core do not solidify and some fraction of the core solidify these elements rise up to the liquid part) and radioactive decay.
The estimates in Earth's Core (by Cormier et al., nice book) are around 0.3 TW for radioactive decay and a few TW (2 to 6) each for the others.
As an order of magnitude estimation, compositional changes, phase transition and original heat loss contributes equally, while radiogenic heat is only a minor contribution.
The heat balance we measure at the surface has obviously much more than this. We have to take into account the secular cooling of the mantle itself (16 TW), plus the heat production of continents (8TW) and again the mantle (11 TW), which are mainly radiogenic (data here from the Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics).
Note that every estimate, despite being in line with scientific consensus, is subject to high uncertainties, due to the very difficult nature of these kind of measures/models.
To close going slightly OT, this combination of heat production and heat loss is the driving force of hot spots and plate tectonics. Which means that the cooling dynamics of the earth is responsible for essentially the entirity of what we observe in the solid earth. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tectonic movement, but also interactions with surface geomorphology are all byproducts of a ball of molten rock cooling.
As far as I understand earth will inevitably become similar to mars: as the earths core cools down and solidifies our magnetic field begins to disintegrate, seismic and volcanic activities will disappear which ultimately will thin out our atmosphere to a point where life will be impossible. We talking billions of years ofc.
According to science only half of earths internal heat stems from radioactivity, the rest being primordial heat. This in turn means our planet is obviously much cooler than it used to be.
https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-still-retains-much-its-original-heat
This seems to ignore the literature stream suggesting that there is a fundamental hemispheric anisotropy of the inner core and that this may relate (in part) to the super-rotation of the inner core (e.g., Dumberry & Mound, 2011, Wazek et al., 2011, Deuss, 2014, Lythgoe et al., 2014, Yu et al., 2017, etc). Is that no longer valid?
Yes to be fair I have missed the gravitational coupling between inner core and mantle (actually I was not overly aware of it as I am more on the astro than geo side of fluid dynamics, so my interactions with deep earth people tend to be where there is over lap, i.e. dynamo theory).
I assume this question originated from buzz (and general misunderstanding) around the newly published Yang & Song, 2023 paper. Many are misinterpreting the suggestion made in this paper that there is a slowing or reversal of differential rotation of the inner core to mean instead mean a slowing or reversal of absolute rotation of the inner core. The competition between the EM and gravitational torques are front and center in this paper, so it's an important clarification to make.
Given the arrival of another very similar question in this subreddit I suspect you are correct that this paper (or more likely the press release I assume it got) has caused some confusion. I can imagine that this particular sentence "This globally consistent pattern suggests that inner-core rotation has recently paused." which is in the abstract has been misunderstood by a nonzero number of people!
edit to add... when I initially answered the question there was no context text showing just a title. Not sure if the context was added later or this is a weird bug of reddit.
Yeah, as the question that spawned this thread was more general, it seemed worth while to pick up and answer a question more specifically focused on the fundamental misunderstandings this recently published paper seems to be propagating.
I have added an edit to this answer linking to your answer in that second one. I do not really follow science news so was unaware of this fiasco! I have since seen tweets of distant colleagues trying to set the record straight as well as one world leading (astro) researcher suggesting that Superman might have been involved...
Yes, references to Superman and/or the potential necessity for us to make some Unobtanium and send Aaron Eckhart, Hillary Swank, and Stanley Tucci et al., into the bowels of the Earth with a bunch of nukes abound today.
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So if the core slows/stops/reverses course then shouldn’t the magnetic field lines of the earth also flip or change in accordance? And if so wouldn’t this transition allow solar wind particles to bombard us in the meantime?
The core is not stopping or reversing it's course. That would be impossible due to being a violation of conservation of momentum.
The study that has been making it's rounds in the media suggests that the core has slightly changed it's rotational velocity relative to the surface, so that it is now spinning slightly slower compared to the surface rather than slightly faster as has been previously noted. They also show evidence that this may be a cycle that reverses every few decades. This is unrelated to the magnetic dynamo of the earth and it's roughly 100,000-year cycles.
The media coverage on this study is probably the worst I have ever seen. It's a very simple concept to explain, but if you explain it correctly it's boring, so I have to imagine that the journalists involved are being wilfully mislead, writing willfully misleading articles, or some combination of both.
It's really bad. Even the publisher is making pretty misleading comments about the paper, like this tweet from Nature that pretty much implies that the inner core is somehow not rotating at all or rotating in an opposite direction.
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Yes, and yes. The magnetic field has flipped before, and during the transition the magnetic field is very weak.
However IIRC it takes on the order of hundred to thousands of years, so probably not something we'll have to worry about. Although the timeline in the article OP is referring to seems to state it's happening faster than we previously thought. (IIRC, In the 90's the core was spinning faster than the planet, by 2009 it was spinning slower)
thanks. i must have mis-read recent news articles that stated that the core had reversed its spin and was now spinning in the opposite direction. this implied to me that the field reversal must have already happened in short order and so we would have seen the effects of that weakening here on the surface.
There is a difference between the inner and outer core. The inner core is approximately solid while the outer core is liquid and is the region that produces the geodynamo. The geomagnetic reversals are more related to the fluid motion in the outer core than the rotation (and/or differential rotation) of the inner core.
thank you for this correction/clarification
I'm not going to blame you, the media coverage on this has been atrocious. Willfully misleading I'd say
one expects sensationalism out of the National Enquirer, but not from so many of the more (formerly) respected outlets that covered this story. everyone's out for click-bait it seems.
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I don’t think the flipping of the magnetic fields poles is at all related to the direction of Earth’s core. I don’t believe the core can change direction or has been asserted to have ever changed direction. I am sure it can slow down and probably speed up, though.
Thanks for the clarification. It looks like there is no consensus on why the magnetic poles flip.
I agree. I don’t think the magnetic field is definitively understood. Oddly. Since it’s all around us.
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dukesdj t1_j5lwto4 wrote
Lorentz forces, that is, forces due to the induced magnetic field of the outer cores geodynamo. I believe this is one of if not the leading mechanism proposed to explain this. Another mechanism would be angular momentum transport by thermal convection in the inner core. However, it is thought that the thermal conductivity within the inner core is too large and so the inner core is stably stratified (no convection and hence no radial transport of angular momentum).
Edit - I have been made aware of a rather amusing debacle in the reporting of a recent paper that is causing a lot of confusion. When I answered the question only the title was showing so my answer was very general to what we know of the inner core and its super rotation (although I did neglect the gravitational coupling between the departure of sphericity of the inner core and the mantle). See this threads top answer which is in context of the recent media hysteria!