Earth’s inner core stopped spinning, might go into reverse...

Researchers of Peking University publish in a study

The earth’s inner core paused its rotation and could go into reverse according to the study published by researchers of Peking University in the journal Nature Gioscience on Monday. The research was conducted by Yi Yang, associate research scientist at Peking University, and Xiaodong Song, Peking University chair professor. They had wanted to study the seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth's inner core along similar paths since the 1960s to infer how fast the inner core is spinning.

However what they discovered after their research was quite unexpected. Earth’s solid inner core is made of mostly iron and nickel which has a liquid outer core separating it from the mantle, semi-solid second layer of earth, below the crust which is the first layer and covers the inner earth underneath it. The liquid outer layer allows the inner core to spin at a rate very different from rotation of the earth itself. They study instead of showing the rotation of the inner core showed that since 2009, seismic records, which previously changed over time, showed little difference. This, they said, suggested that the inner core rotation had paused.

"We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back," they wrote in the study. Song and Yang also mentions that there might be cycle in how the rotation comes to a pause in the inner core and it might occur every 7 decades after finding similar patterns in prior to 2009/2010 courier in the early 70s. They also argue that a small imbalance in the electromagnetic and gravitational forces could slow and even reverse the inner core's rotation