Geophysicist John Vidale noticed something striking while tracking the way seismic waves move from Earth’s crust through its core. The very center of the planet, a solid ball of iron and nickel ...
An artist's rendition of a cross-section of Earth. The innermost layer, the inner core, is a 1,500-mile-wide ball of iron. CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images For decades, ...
Earth's inner core may have paused and reversed its spin, a new study suggests. Earthquakes and nuclear blasts can send seismic waves through the mysterious solid-iron core. Those waves hint that the ...
At its equator, Earth is spinning at about 1,040 mph. But what if it just suddenly stopped? You and everything else could go flying at hundreds of miles per hour, unless you're at the poles. Earth's ...
The Earth spins on its axis once every 24 hours, right? Actually, no. The length of each day varies widely by a few milliseconds. According to the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems ...
Earth's changing spin is threatening to toy with our sense of time, clocks and computerized society in an unprecedented way — but only for a second. For the first time in history, world timekeepers ...