lava Archives - ATLANTIS RISING THE RESEARCH REPORT

by Becky Ferreira

Earth’s inner core has recently stopped spinning, and may now be reversing the direction of its rotation, according to a surprising new study that probed the deepest reaches of our planet with seismic waves from earthquakes.

The mind-boggling results suggest that Earth’s center pauses and reverses direction on a periodic cycle lasting about 60 to 70 years, a discovery that might solve longstanding mysteries about climate and geological phenomena that occur on a similar timeframe, and that affect life on our planet.

Of course, it must be noted this is more or less the plot of the 2003 disaster film The Core, but there’s no need to worry about averting an impending apocalypse by nuking the center of Earth. While the core’s rotation influences Earth’s surface environment, scientists think this periodic spin switch is a normal part of its behavior that does not pose risks for life on our planet.

Earth’s inner core, say scientists, is a solid metal ball that is 75 percent the size of the Moon. It can spin at different speeds and directions compared to our planet because it is nestled within a liquid outer core, but scientists are not sure exactly how fast it spins or whether its speed varies over time.

Located some 3,000 miles beneath our feet, the core experiences intense heat on par with the surface of the Sun. Because it is so remote and difficult to study, the inner core remains one of the least understood environments on our planet, though it’s clear that it plays a role in many processes that make our world habitable to life, such as the generation of Earth’s protective magnetic field, which blocks harmful radiation from reaching the surface.

Now, Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, a pair of researchers at Peking University’s SinoProbe Lab at School of Earth and Space Sciences, have captured “surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s,” according to a study published in Nature Geoscience (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01113-y).

“There are two major forces acting on the inner core,” Yang and Song said in an email to Motherboard. “One is the electromagnetic force. The Earth’s magnetic field is generated by fluid motion in the outer core. The magnetic field acting on the metallic inner core is expected to drive the inner core to rotate by electromagnetic coupling. The other is gravity force. The mantle and inner core are both highly heterogeneous, so the gravity between their structures tends to drag the inner core to the position of gravitational equilibrium, so called gravitational coupling.”

“If the two forces are not balanced out, the inner core will accelerate or decelerate,” they added. “Both the magnetic field and the Earth’s rotation have a strong periodicity of 60-70 years. We believe that the proposed 70-year oscillation of the inner core is driven by the electromagnetic and gravitational forces.”
Song has spent decades trying to unravel the mysteries of the inner core by studying seismic waves that pass through this distant region. He was part of the team that first reported evidence of the inner core’s rotation in 1996 by measuring slight time (or “temporal”) changes in these waves, which are generated by earthquakes.

However, the origin of the temporal changes has been a matter of debate within the geoscience community ever since, as some scientists think the wave patterns arise from phenomena at the boundary between the outer and inner core.

“Some researchers are still arguing that the temporal changes do not come from the inner-core rotation, but from localized deformation at the inner core boundary,” Yang and Song said. With their new study, the pair “tried to gather more data over a longer duration to test different models.”

To that end, the team studied seismic waves that passed through the inner core made by earthquakes that occurred since the 1960s. In particular, they looked for “doublet” events, which are “repeating earthquakes with nearly identical waveforms at common receivers,” according to the study. By analyzing the slight temporal changes between these doublets, Yang and Song were able to probe the rotation of the inner core.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgyje7/earths-core-has-stopped-and-may-be-reversing-direction-study-says

AR #129

The Crystal Connection

by Martin Ruggles

Deep Holes on Earth Set to Tap Ancient Geothermal Sources

There’s an abandoned coal power plant in upstate New York that most people regard as a useless relic. But MIT’s Paul Woskov sees things differently.

Woskov, a research engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, notes the plant’s power turbine is still intact and the transmission lines still run to the grid. Using an approach he’s been working on for the last 14 years, he’s hoping it will be back online, completely carbon-free, within the decade.

In fact, Quaise Energy, the company commercializing Woskov’s work, believes if it can retrofit one power plant, the same process will work on virtually every coal and gas power plant in the world.

Quaise is hoping to accomplish those lofty goals by tapping into the energy source below our feet. The company plans to vaporize enough rock to create the world’s deepest holes and harvest geothermal energy at a scale that could satisfy human energy consumption for millions of years. They haven’t yet solved all the related engineering challenges, but Quaise’s founders have set an ambitious timeline to begin harvesting energy from a pilot well by 2026.
The plan would be easier to dismiss as unrealistic if it were based on a new and unproven technology. But Quaise’s drilling systems center around a microwave-emitting device called a gyrotron that has been used in research and manufacturing for decades.

“This will happen quickly once we solve the immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having it operate at a high energy density without breakdown,” explains Woskov, who is not formally affiliated with Quaise but serves as an advisor. “It’ll go fast because the underlying technology, gyrotrons, are commercially available. You could place an order with a company and have a system delivered right now — granted, these beam sources have never been used 24/7, but they are engineered to be operational for long time periods. In five or six years, I think we’ll have a plant running if we solve these engineering problems. I’m very optimistic.”

Woskov and many other researchers have been using gyrotrons to heat material in nuclear fusion experiments for decades. It wasn’t until 2008, however, after the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) published a request for proposals on new geothermal drilling technologies, that Woskov thought of using gyrotrons for a new application.
“[Gyrotrons] haven’t been well-publicized in the general science community, but those of us in fusion research understood they were very powerful beam sources — like lasers, but in a different frequency range,” Woskov says. “I thought, why not direct these high-power beams, instead of into fusion plasma, down into rock and vaporize the hole?”

As power from other renewable energy sources has exploded in recent decades, geothermal energy has plateaued, mainly because geothermal plants only exist in places where natural conditions allow for energy extraction at relatively shallow depths of up to 400 feet beneath the Earth’s surface. At a certain point, conventional drilling becomes impractical because deeper crust is both hotter and harder, which wears down mechanical drill bits.
Woskov’s idea to use gyrotron beams to vaporize rock sent him on a research journey that has never really stopped. With some funding from MITEI, he began running tests, quickly filling his office with small rock formations he’d blasted with millimeter waves from a small gyrotron in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

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https://news.mit.edu/2022/quaise-energy-geothermal-0628