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Earths Core Rotating Faster Than the Rest of Earth

	Written by SerenaStargazer
Monday, 05 September 2005
Xiaodong Song, a seismologist at Columbia University in New York, has concluded that Earth’s inner core is rotating faster than the rest of the planet, based on his examinations of historical records of 18 pairs of earthquakes from around the South Sandwich Islands in the south Atlantic. The earthquakes that made up each pair originated at exactly the same location, from a few days to 34 years apart. Song found that if the quakes in a pair occurred more than four years apart, the waves that travelled through the inner core reached Alaska more quickly after the second quake than after the first. However, the waves that only passed through the outer core, avoiding the inner core, did not show such a difference in travel times. Song believes that the difference is caused by the rotation of the inner core, which causes the waves from the second earthquake to travel through a slightly different patch of the inner core than the waves from the first earthquake. He has calculated that the inner core is rotating 0.3 to 0.5 degrees per year relative to the mantle and crust. It should complete one extra revolution over the next 900 years.

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