Science is hard. Writing about science can be hard too, although it’s almost never as hard as doing actual science. And yet we science writers tend to get the science wrong a lot. This appears to be the case, to a rather stunning extent, in the instance of the reporting this week around new findings that researchers say shows the rotation of Earth’s inner core is slowing down relative to the spin of the mantle above it.
It helps to visualize this: Earth’s inner core is a solid ball that is surrounded by a fluid outer core. This is how it can rotate at a different pace compared to the planet’s outer layers — it’s essentially spinning at its own pace in a molten ocean at the center of our world… More.
