Scientists have discovered that iron atoms in the inner core can switch places with each other in a fraction of a second while keeping the overall shape of the iron crystal intact.
This phenomenon is called "collective motion" – they say it is similar to how guests at a dinner party can swap seats without changing the table layout.
Jung-Fu Lin, one of the lead authors of the study and a professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences, revealed they now have a fundamental mechanism that will aid in comprehending the dynamic processes and evolution of the Earth's inner core. Since it is impossible to directly sample the inner core, about 3,728 miles below the surface, Lin and his colleagues from China recreated it in a miniature version in the lab. They used a small iron plate and shot it with a high-speed projectile to mimic the pressure and temperature conditions of the. They then measured the experiment's temperature, pressure, and velocity data. They fed it into a machine-learning computer model that simulated how iron atoms behave in the inner core.
The researchers said that this collective motion could explain why seismic measurements of the inner core show that it is much softer and more deformable than expected at such high pressures. Co-lead author Youjun Zhang, a professor at Sichuan University, said that this discovery challenges the conventional view of the inner core as a rigid and static sphere.
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