Newsweek
Holy Grail’
BY PANDORA DEWAN ON 10/6/23 AT 5:24 AM EDT
Physicists have come closer to solving one of the biggest mysteries in geophysics: how the Earth powers its magnetic field.
The team, from the University of Texas at Austin and collaborators at Sichuan and Nanjing Universities in China, believe that their discovery provides a fundamental physical mechanism to help explain the surprisingly “soft” physical properties of the Earth’s dense inner core.
Roughly 1,800 miles beneath the Earth’s crust lies a ball-shaped core made largely of the metals iron and nickel. The core is super-hot, ranging from about 8,000 to 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and is made up of two parts: the liquid outer core, and the dense, solid inner core.