Core of Earth is not 'boring'; check exciting new discovery

Scientists have discovered that the core of Earth isn’t at all boring. There is some exciting stuff down there, which has been made clear by earthquake data.

In the core of the Earth, there are both hard and soft surfaces, which was revealed by earthquake data. (Google Earth)

What do we know about the core of the Earth? That it has a mantle and a core, with the latter made of solid iron, right? Researchers have now figured out that the earth's innards are not that way at all. The Earth's core is possibly a mixture of both solid and “soft surfaces”, as documented by a a new study published on the Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors.

"The more that we look at it, the more we realize it's not one boring blob of iron," Jessica Irving, a University of Bristol, England, seismologist who didn't take part in the study, told Techradar over at Live Science. "We're finding a whole new hidden world,” the person added.

Earth's core may not be all solid

Rhett Butler, a geophycist at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, found something unusual while studying earthquake data. When studying it from the other side of the world, the data did not match according to the known facts.

The data that Butler studied is only possible when the Earth's core is not entirely solid. He says that such kind of data only hints at the possibility of our panet's core not being entirely solid.

"We've seen evidence that not only is it not soft everywhere; it's really hard in some places," Butler said. "It's got hard surfaces right up against melted or mushy iron. So we're seeing a lot of detail within the inner core that we didn't see before."

How does a non-solid Earth core affect us?

The Earth's mantle and core are responsible for creating the magnetic field around our planet. This magnetic field has been responsible for keeping us safe agaonst the sun's harsh solar storms and other forms of harmful radiations. The magnetic field deflects these solar storms away from us, there by keeping us safe.

So far, we knew that the solid core could make for a predictable magnetic field around our planet. However, with a soft core material, it could have different effects on the magnetic field. Currently, we do not have enough data on what these effects exactly are.