According to a recent study, the Earth’s core may have stopped spinning, or else, may even be spinning backwards. The core of our planet is made up of an outer layer of liquid metal, and an inner core of solid metal that is about 70 per cent the size of the Moon. It is generally believed that the core rotates counter-clockwise when viewed from the North Pole, like the rest of planet the Earth. However in contrast to this, a study analyzing seismic wave data over the past 60 years by researchers at Peking University in China has come up with the notion that the core’s rotation stopped around the year 2009, and then restarted in the opposite direction. They added that a complete cycle, in one direction and then the other, of this swing is about 70 years. This means that the last rotation change before 2009 would have occurred in the early 1970s, and the next one will take place in the mid-2040s.
The debate yet continues as gathering information in this regard is extremely difficult. The edge of the outer core meets the Earth’s mantle at a depth of around 2,890 km, and this outer core is believed to be made of liquid iron and nickel. The inner core starts around 5,000 km below the surface of the planet, and is thought to be made of solid iron and nickel, due to the extreme pressure forcing the atoms of the metal to pack togethe