Earth's inner core is solid and blistering hot. For decades, scientists have known the inner core is solid thanks to the pioneering work of Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann, who first proposed its ...

The inner core is made of solid iron-nickel about 3,000 miles below the surface of the Earth. Scientists believe that the inner core’s rotation began to slow down in 2010, but what that really ...

The liquid outer core, which extends to 1,795 miles above the solid core, Koper says, produces a protective field of magnetic energy. The molten metal cools as it approaches Earth’s rocky mantle ...

The Earth’s inner core is incredibly tricky to study, since it’s buried beneath thousands of miles of rock. New seismic studies suggest that it’s not just a solid ball of iron, as has been ...

“The molten outer core is widely known to be turbulent, but its turbulence had not been observed to disrupt its neighbor the inner core on a human timescale,” Vidale said in a press statement.

On Earth, the solid inner core drives convection in the liquid outer core, which generates the planet’s magnetic field. If Mars has a similar core structure, why doesn’t it have a similar field?.

In a study released this week, a pair of seismologists at the Australian National University documented new evidence of a 400-mile-thick solid metallic ball at the center of Earth’s inner core ...

"This increased movement makes the inner core less rigid [and] weaker against shear forces," Lin said. This could explain why the inner core is "surprisingly soft," he added.

Update: As reported below, research from January 2023 indicated that the solid metal core of Earth might have reversed its spin, as part of a decades-long pattern of slowing down and speeding up.

The spin of Earth’s inner core may have slowed, with the heart of the planet now rotating at a slightly more sluggish clip than the layers above, new research finds. The slowdown could change ...