In a examine printed Monday within the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers stated the reversal of the interior core rotation would shorten the size of the day by a fraction of a millisecond over the course of a 12 months, and might need a small impact on Earth’s magnetic area, however wouldn’t have an effect on life on the floor. The Earth’s interior core is manufactured from iron and nickel and is separated from the remainder of the strong Earth by the liquid outer core, enabling it to rotate otherwise than the remainder of the planet.

“In concept it has been occurring for a very long time however we solely have observations over just a few a long time,” said Xiaodong Song, a seismologist at Peking University in Beijing, and a co-author of the new study.

The spinning of the inner core is caused by the magnetic field that is generated by the liquid outer core, Dr. Song said. Understanding how the inner core rotates can help scientists figure out how the different layers of the Earth interact with each other.

Dr. Song and co-author Yi Yang, also a seismologist at Peking University, analyzed seismic waves from similar earthquakes that have passed through the Earth along similar paths since the 1960s. They found that between 2009 and 2020, that rotation has stopped and might have reversed direction.

“We have those repeating earthquakes that happen at the same location,” Dr. Yang stated. “It is like we’re doing a CT scan for the Earth.”

John Vidale, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California who wasn’t involved with the study, said there may be other interpretations of the seismic data.

“The changes they noticed are valid although what’s actually happening isn’t so clear,” Dr. Vidale stated. “They have an excellent evaluation and the speculation they put within the papers might be pretty much as good as something in the mean time, however there are a number of competing concepts as properly.”

Dr. Vidale says different scientists theorize that the interior core modifications its rotation at shorter intervals than the 70-year cycle described by the brand new examine’s authors. Other theories from scientists embrace that the interior core’s rotation really stopped between 2001 and 2003, or that it isn’t actually reversed in any respect, however simply modified the way in which it rotates, Dr. Vidale stated.