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Geologists Claim Earth May Be Softer Around The Middle Than Previously Thought

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jan 28, 2008 01:07 PM
from the creamy-nougat-center dept.
News Science
A new geological study is suggesting that what we know about the lower mantle of the Earth may have to be reevaluated. Since we are unable to actually sample the Earth at those depths, scientists rely on the use of seismic waves to study the lower reaches of the Earth. This new study suggests that material in the lower mantle has unusual characteristics that make sound move more slowly, suggesting a softer makeup than previously thought. "What's most important for seismology is the acoustic properties--the propagation of sound. We determined the elasticity of ferropericlase through the pressure-induced high-spin to low-spin transition. We did this by measuring the velocity of acoustic waves propagating in different directions in a single crystal of the material and found that over an extended pressure range (from about 395,000 to 590,000 atmospheres) the material became 'softer'--that is, the waves slowed down more than expected from previous work. Thus, at high temperature corresponding distributions will become very broad, which will result in a wide range of depth having subtly anomalous properties that perhaps extend through most of the lower mantle."
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Geologists Claim Earth May Be Softer Around The Middle Than Previously Thought 50 Comments More /

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  • Perhaps it should try (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lucas123 (935744) on Monday January 28 2008, @01:11PM (#22210196) Homepage
    Jenny Craig. It worked for Pluto.
    • Mmmmmm - I just love it when the soft gooey center is just right. Dip it in a red giant, and just nibble it . . .

      Pug
      • BAH! and you call yourself Scientists! Global Warming only happens to keep the Earth Egg properly nurtured until it cracks open vomiting the spawn of the Old Ones into the chaos. Don't worry though; it will only happen when the middle of the Earth starts thinning measurably and... oh dear...

  • It gets older - it gets fatter! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Makes sense - it gets older - it gets fatter - softer in the middle :-)
  • And chewy too!

  • Well duh! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Brandybuck (704397) on Monday January 28 2008, @01:15PM (#22210248) Homepage Journal
    Well duh! As I get older I get softer around the middle too!

  • Middleaged earth (Score:5, Funny)

    by butterwise (862336) <butterwise AT gmail> on Monday January 28 2008, @01:15PM (#22210252)
    Softer around the middle, thinning ice sheets - sounds like somebody's getting older...

  • Earth! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Daishiman (698845) on Monday January 28 2008, @01:15PM (#22210256)
    Earth!
    Now with delicious soft filling and an irresistably crunchy core!
    • Obviously you didn't RTFA, just the headline!

      Geologists Claim Earth May Be Softer Around The Middle Than Previously Thought.

      AP - Reports of nougat center, still unconfirmed. Scientists say, "More study and milk required."
    • Now I understand what Galactus saw in eating earth. :)
  • So is that why our nights are so long?

    More on topic, I wonder what difference this will make to the study of seismology? Don't different densities refract the pressure waves from seismic events? Perhaps this new model will improve the ability to measure the location of earthquakes?

  • Jawbreaker (Score:3, Funny)

    by 4D6963 (933028) on Monday January 28 2008, @01:18PM (#22210290)

    I said it before and I'll say it again, the Earth is a giant micro-waved jawbreaker [wikipedia.org], and it's warming up! Y'all laughed at me, just wait until you get licked to death by the giant tongue from outer space, or burnt to death once it explodes.

  • Welcome (Score:4, Funny)

    by Capt James McCarthy (860294) on Monday January 28 2008, @01:26PM (#22210402) Journal
    To middle-age, Earth. Wait until things begin to get saggy and noisy all over.

  • The Kola Superdeep Borehole (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RipTides9x (804495) on Monday January 28 2008, @01:33PM (#22210490) Journal
    The Russians made 6.7km before giving up drilling not only because of the heat (180c), which could have been worked around, but mainly because any further drilling beyond that point the hole had a tendency to close up like molten soft plastic upon retraction of the drill bit.

    http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=567 [damninteresting.com]

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RipTides9x (804495)
      Damn I stepped on my dick, they made 12Km before calling it quits, 6.7Km is the depth they were finding fossils where they didn't expect it.

      • Damn I stepped on my dick, they made 12Km

        You mean you replied to all the spam, and it worked?

      • Damn I stepped on my dick...

        Without pictures, it didn't happen.

      • Damn I stepped on my dick, they made 12Km before calling it quits, 6.7Km is the depth they were finding fossils where they didn't expect it.

        Could you point me at the original reports of them finding fossils at any depth in the Kola super-deep borehole/ ANY fossils. ANY depth. I'm not particularly bothered if the reports are in the original Russian, or translated into English (or French for that matter).

        I'll give you a hint - I read some of the original reports myself when I was studying high-P metamorphism

    • Cool article.

      Just one question... I know that Libraries of Congress is a unit of information, and Volkswagons are units of mass. When did Abe Vigoda become a unit of age?
    • Well, duh. Teconic Enginnering is a pretty advanced tech field so it's obvious that we don't have Core Waste Dumps and/or Deep Core Mining yet. Given the fact that neither do we have developed Artificial Planets nor do we have contact with any other intelligent species yet, there's no way for us to have access to that stuff. I mean, we don't even have a Nuclear Drive yet.

      If/when the Antarans show up we're going to be so screwed...
      • Remember that the size of their fleet is based on the current level of technology in the galaxy. So even if we got attacked, it would just be by a single frigate - can't kill more than a few million & blow up a few factories.
  • I wonder whether this observation gives any more credibility to the theory that the center of the Earth might have a nuclear reactor. The following article describes the theory:

    http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/jan252002/126.pdf [ias.ac.in]
    • There is a chipmunk
      At the center of the earth
      And in his big oven
      He bakes his own desserts
      He warms the ocean
      And from that, life springs forth
      Little organisms building trash around the clock

      Compost heaps
      Or melting pots
      For Farmer John's
      Smoked Sausage stocks

      Worms make the dirt
      And the dirt makes the earth
      And all of the roots have a place to sleep now
      All the chanuks have squash to eat now
      Worms make the dirt
      And the dirt makes the earth
      And people hold hands and feel terrific
      Food comes from dirt
    • Interesting article, thanks. And it was nice of the paper to discuss the Oklo [wikipedia.org] phenomenon. As far as the area around the earth's core being a nuclear reactor in the sense of maintaining a critical mass and critical geometry, I think that, at best the criticality is transient and unstable, going from subcritical to supercritical and vice-versa, given the dynamic nature of the fluid.

      Another fascinating observation from the paper is the dominance of the U235/U238 ratios, and how U235 (the fissile isotope)
  • Everybody knows that the earth is really hollow and is filled with Reptilians who were banished there for being mean. Just wait til these goofy scientists find a way into it in 2012. Then we will all be doomed.

    Until then, I will keep wearing my tinfoil hat with pride.
  • I can imagine that earth's "core" may be soft. My reasoning tells me that the "core" is not subject to much gravity. A micro-gravity environment, if you will, due to the relative equal mass in all directions pulling in all directions that balance. Once I think that, I have trouble wrapping my brain around the question: "How great is the pressure?"

    If the answer is (relatively speaking) low pressure, then with the estimated high temperature I can imagine a liquid like center.
    • The "core" is not subject to much gravity - relative equal mass in all directions pulling in all directions that balance.

      Damn, you beat me to it! That's exactly what I've been toying with for some time now, with an additional question: The densest materials fall to the bottom of the gravity well... and where exactly is that? Or put in another way - do the densest materials fall to a point of zero gravity?

      Of course, if you shift the liquefied iron or lead to, say the right, there's gonna be more of the Ea
    • If all the mass is attracting all the other mass, then the center will have the highest pressure, even if the local gravity is balanced. Remember, in the center you have this big spherical mass all around that is self-attracting. So the mass at the "left" is attracting that on the "right" and the "top" and "bottom" are interacting with both. So the only thing that stops them from pulling together is your matter in the center which must exert an equal and opposite resistance to compression force.

      Just beca
  • At the center of the earth is a singularity.

    Hell, it'd explain the red-shift and why no one can travel faster than the speed of light. ;^)

    --
    Toro

  • A softer than expected inner layer was the base of the crustal shifting theory of Charles Hapgood in his Path of the Pole [amazon.com] book.

    The book and theories were prefaced/backed by Einstein, but it was rejected by geologists.

    Maybe there was a seed of truth in Hapgood's work?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Knuckles (8964)
      I didn't know that creationists think that planet earth developed through evolution. This might explain some of their confusion, then.
      As for the quote from Genesis: you might be better off reading a version that was not mangled by hundreds of years of wrong translations and political machinations.
      • Hail Slashdot, where ideology always trumps evidence.

        I always have the same response for this, every time: Stop with the rhetoric and show me the manuscripts. It's not like Hebrew is some obscure language that nobody understands. So, how would YOU translate the passage in question?
        • "6489 207435 890634 72 34893 41 98673 83576 60354847 935078 94370543 87 52403795 4309827 50943875 4092473 50947 320957 430".
        • There is no original Hebrew text of Genesis since it is a collection of writings by anonymous contributors, written a few hundred years B.C. Nobody was obviously present during the actual event anyway. Plus, I do not speak or read Hewbrew. But I do know that Hewbrew is so open to interpretation that the Kabbalah is able to add a "hidden" esoteric interpretation level to the Jewish holy texts, alont to the other three levels of "regular" Thora study, which already add heaps of interpretation. So it's not as
          • I wrote "Hewbrew", thrice :( I blame it on the early morning hour in which I wrote this.
            • "I wrote "Hewbrew", thrice :( I blame it on the early morning hour in which I wrote this."
              So, it's too early in the week for thee to be creating?
          • Well, if you basically use the rule "anyone can make words mean anything they want them to", you can surely make Genesis say whatever you want. What the Kabbalists do is pretty much irrelevant to what the actual words of a manuscript are, and what those word mean (I am thoroughly acquainted with what they do to a biblical text, having read many of the old talmudic sources). The same thing is done with the Greek texts by the gematria-obsessed gnostic crowd. Don't even get me started on all the Bible-code gar
            • Uh, I never wrote "there is no Hebrew text of Genesis". What I did write is that "there is no original Hebrew text of Genesis since it is a collection of writings by anonymous contributors". There is a difference, you know.

              Anyway, your "Brother's Karamazov" (sic) counter example is ridiculous. I will not find the same problem there, as the Brothers Karamazov does not expect me to take it as God's own words and to believe each and every word in it on faith.

              My problem is not that there are translation and tra
              • Your original post was about the grammar and the translation of same. Therefore it is not a ridiculous comparison, since your argument was not about the theology, but about the meaning of specific words.

                As to your other questions, I never waste my time arguing theology on Slashdot. Fully prepared to do so. Stupid place to do it. It's like trying to play chess while there is an entire audience booing, throwing rotten vegetables, and spouting Monty Python quotations.

                Actually, I think Luther would laugh at you
            • Just wanted to add 2 things:

              1. As you correctly remarked, I am anything but an expert in these things. But that's not needed for this discussion, which I meant to be about whether it makes sense to have unquestioned believe in a translated text that you _know_ is not the same as the original.

              2. You didn't address my point that neither translation makes any sense, what with the separating of water and water through whatever, be it an expanse, a stretched out thing, a vault or a stronghold.
      • Before you go trolling, at least get your there, their, and they're down. Basic grammar goes a lot way to helping your "argument".

        Ouch, that's embarrassing.
          • Isn't it like someone had intelligently designed grammar nazis so they embarrass themselves every time they make a correction?
            :P

      • Re:Creation +1, Evolution -1 (Score:5, Informative)

        by night_flyer (453866) on Monday January 28 2008, @02:24PM (#22211286) Homepage
        firmament
        c.1250, from L. firmamentum "firmament," lit. "a support or strengthening," from firmus "firm" (see firm (adj.)), used in Vulgate to translate Gk. stereoma "firm or solid structure," which translated Heb. raqia, a word used of both the vault of the sky and the floor of the earth in the O.T., probably lit. "expanse," from raqa "to spread out," but in Syriac meaning "to make firm or solid," hence the erroneous translation.
        • Correct. Jerome was influenced heavily by the Septuagint, who were in turn influenced by the prevailing cosmology of Alexandria, Egypt, which considered the sky as a vaulted ceiling with support structures.

          As for the Hebrew understanding of the construction of the sky, other references hold the idea of something that is stretched or spread out. The idea of a vaulted support is not to be found in Hebrew cosmology.
      • I like doing this to creationists, too.

        Why do you like picking on the mentally challenged?
      • Well your test is unfair, not to mention arrogant. You're using specialized jargon vocabulary and concluding from the 'duh' reaction that the person tested wouldn't have a cogent opinion if you phrased it in terms he understood. That's illogical.

        Your car mechanic could do the same trick to you by making use of jargon, slang acronyms and whatnot, so that you'd respond with a 'duh' when asked (in jargonspeak) whether you think your car would get better gas mileage under hard or gentle acceleration.

        Stripped
        • Democracies only work properly if the people making the decisions are well-informed. Someone who gets all his informations from publications like the National Enquirer (USA), the Sun (UK) or the BILD (Germany) is unlikely to make a useful decision.

          But hey, that's what we elect people for: So they can inform themselves and make wise decisions. We elect them based on those decisions so they better get their knowledge up to snuff. Before election time. And that doesn't mean "listen to one lobbyist from Chevr
    • Gravity is zero at the center of any spheroid, either solid or hollow (because you have an equal amount of mass pulling you in every direction. The only difference between hollow and solid spheres, is that in a solid spheroid, you have the pressure of the density of the medium. In the case of earth, it would be like being really deep in the Ocean, but obviously much worse (you should have seen enough horror movies to figure out what happens there). If, instead you were able to somehow produce a tunnel th

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