Earth's interior is a far from quiet place. Deep below our surface activities, the planet rumbles with activity, from plate tectonics to convection currents that circulate through the hot magmatic fluids far underneath the crust.
Now scientists studying satellite data of Earth have identified something inside Earth we've never seen before: a new type of magnetic wave that sweeps around the surface of our planet's core, every seven years.
"We combined satellite measurements from Swarm, and also from the earlier German Champ mission and Danish Ørsted mission, with a computer model of the geodynamo to explain what the ground-based data had thrown up – and this led to our discovery."Earth's magnetic field is the subject of much fascination for scientists.
– a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid that converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy, spinning a magnetic field out into space around the planet.satellites are a trio of identical probes, launched in 2013 and hanging out in Earth orbit to study the activity inside Earth – with a specific eye on the magnetic and dynamic activity coming out of the core. It was in this data that Gillet and his team discovered the fascinating new waves.
They sweep around the boundary between the core and the mantle with an amplitude of around 3 kilometers per year, and move westward at a rate of up to 1,500 kilometers per year.
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