[HN Gopher] Has Earth's inner core stopped its strange spin?
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Has Earth's inner core stopped its strange spin?
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-01-23 21:29 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Topic reminds of film The Core in which the core has stopped
| rotating initiating a series of apocalyptic phenomena. (And in a
| Hollywoodian fashion the solution is to release a few nukes in it
| to restart it.)
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Naturally, the only way to get to The Core is with a vehicle
| made from a metal[0] which gets sturdier (rather than... melt)
| as it gets hotter.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
| amelius wrote:
| That was a really bad movie.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yes, but I know a group of geologists that made a drinking
| game out of everything the movie got wrong about geology.
| They are always quite drunk by the end!
| pchristensen wrote:
| Sounds dangerous!
| wilg wrote:
| It's absolutely amazing though.
| dylan604 wrote:
| absolutely amazingly bad though.
|
| i recently (within a few weeks) watched this from beginning
| to end, and holy cow was i not impressed. to have so many
| actors of high report to end up such a horrible movie.
| amelius wrote:
| They wanted to make a disaster movie, and the movie
| indeed turned out to be a disaster :)
| chungy wrote:
| Sometimes all it takes is a film to be entertaining enough,
| regardless of how dumb it may be.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Really bad, but I absolutely love trash like this for some
| reason. I can watch movies like The Core over and over.
| telman17 wrote:
| Same, my wife is a geologist and one of my favorite things
| is to make her watch cheesy disaster movies with me. The
| commentary is hilarious.
| belthesar wrote:
| I wish my wife appreciated my commentary whenever there's
| an obligatory hacking/software related bit on TV, haha.
| greenbit wrote:
| What are you talking about, that movie is a National
| Treasure.
| rapnie wrote:
| It made a Deep Impact on me.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| Sandworms gotta live somewhere
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Topic reminds of film The Core in which the core has stopped
| rotating initiating a series of apocalyptic phenomena. (And in
| a Hollywoodian fashion the solution is to release a few nukes
| in it to restart it.)
|
| They should use it in public schools to teach earth science.
| sophacles wrote:
| We took out all the oil, and the dynamo ground to a halt. Neat.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| I think something is being poorly explained, because that's a lot
| - a very big lot - of angular momentum that's got to go somewhere
| or come from somewhere.
| mcdonje wrote:
| So, I think the headline is a little misleading. The article
| talks about the core spinning in relationship to the earth's
| spin. So, the disputed claim is that it has been spinning
| faster than the earth, and it's going to be spinning slower
| than the earth. It's not stopping or reversing.
|
| As for what would cause it to slow down or speed up with
| relationship to the speed of the planet's spin, they just say
| "magnetic and gravitational forces", whatever that means.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| Maybe earth is a cat. They can flip themselves around while in
| the air without exchanging momentum with anything.
| sliken wrote:
| Well keep in mind that it's not the rotation that's stopping,
| or reversing.
|
| So far there's debate, but the data supports the core is
| spinning 0.1 degrees per year faster or slower. Other
| researchers think it's changes in the surface of the core (not
| the rotation). What we do know is that earthquakes show waves
| that travel slightly faster or slower than we'd expect if the
| core's rotational speed was constant with the rest of the
| planet.
|
| But overall it's nearly in the noise compared to the other
| energies involved. The flows involved are turbulent and move
| like fluids, but at the pressures and viscosties involved they
| change rather slowly. Some models show it switching from
| slightly faster (0.1 degrees per year) to slightly slower ever
| 35 years or so.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| aerophilic wrote:
| Question: Is anyone familiar/aware of the possible implications
| to the global magnetic field?
|
| I know magnetic north has been slowly shifting... but as I
| understand it, this currently involves changing the values on
| runways (the number on a runway is the degrees per magnetic
| north)... but that is pretty much it.
|
| What happens if magnetic north becomes magnetic south?
|
| Is there anything beyond the obvious (compasses and things that
| rely on compasses) that would be impacted?
| david927 wrote:
| Well, it had been slowly shifting around northern Canada for
| the hundreds of years we have records. Lately, though, it's
| been moving quite quickly towards Siberia:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Ma...
|
| I wonder if these two things are related.
| greenbit wrote:
| From what I've heard, the problem is that the reversal can take
| a few years, during which there may be almost no field
| strength. That, and there's no guarantee about exactly where
| the new poles will develop, apart from them appearing at
| relatively high latitudes.
| xattt wrote:
| * * *
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > The only way out of the morass is to wait for more earthquakes
| to happen.
|
| Modern sensors might be sensitive enough that a nuke could
| provide sufficient stimulation?
| version_five wrote:
| "I keep thinking we're on the verge of figuring this out," says
| John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern
| California in Los Angeles. "But I'm not sure."
|
| I wish we saw a lot more of this and less of the "science tells
| us" stuff that seems to dominate reporting now
| munchler wrote:
| > less of the "science tells us" stuff
|
| Such as? Seems to me that good science does tell us stuff, and
| also admits when it doesn't know.
| XorNot wrote:
| The OP is complaining about mainstream science reporting, in
| comments on an article being posted by _Nature_ - which is
| literally the absolute top of peer-reviewed journals.
|
| Which is to say, it suffers from the same fallacy as when
| people complain about Hacker News' collective opinion as
| though a collective anything with voluntary participation is
| going to be in anyway consistent.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| With coordination, I believe several high-level Hamon users could
| undo this problem.
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