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 center of the Earth is nothing like this fanciful depiction - and in some ways is even more dramatic.
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. "If we were somehow able to dismantle the Earth by removing its mantle and the liquid outer core, the inner core would appear shining like a star. Its temperature is estimated to be about 5,500-6,000 degrees , similar to the sun's surface temperature," Tkalčić said.
"It could be caused by different arrangements of iron atoms at high temperatures and pressures or the preferred alignment of growing crystals," Pham said.
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