{"id":199067,"date":"2024-11-09T05:25:24","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T11:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/how-earths-magnetic-field-influences-flows-in-the-planets-core"},"modified":"2024-11-09T05:25:24","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T11:25:24","slug":"how-earths-magnetic-field-influences-flows-in-the-planets-core","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/how-earths-magnetic-field-influences-flows-in-the-planets-core","title":{"rendered":"How Earth\u2019s Magnetic Field Influences Flows in the Planet\u2019s Core"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-earths-magnetic-field-influences-flows-in-the-planets-core.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A \u201cLittle Earth Experiment\u201d inside a giant magnet sheds light on so-far-unexplained flow patterns in Earth\u2019s interior.<\/p>\n<p>Earth\u2019s inner core is a hot, solid ball\u2014about 20% of Earth\u2019s radius\u2014made of an iron alloy. The planet\u2019s outer core, beneath the rocky mantle, is a colder, liquid metal. Geophysics models explain that, since the movement of a liquid metal induces electrical currents, and currents induce a magnetic field, convection and rotation produce our planet\u2019s magnetic fields. But these models typically neglect an important contribution: how Earth\u2019s magnetic field influences the very flows that generate it. Alban Poth\u00e9rat of Coventry University, UK, and collaborators have now developed a theory that accounts for such feedback and vetted it using a lab-based \u201cLittle Earth Experiment\u201d [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v17\/142#c1\" class=\"\">1<\/a>]. Their results inform a model pinpointing processes that might explain the discrepancies between theoretical predictions and satellite observations of Earth, opening new perspectives on the study of geophysical flows.<\/p>\n<p>Understanding flows in planetary interiors is a long-standing challenge. \u201cIf you don\u2019t account for the fact that the magnetic field itself changes the flow, then you won\u2019t get the right flow,\u201d says Poth\u00e9rat. Indeed, both satellite data from the European Space Agency\u2019s Swarm mission and state-of-the-art numerical simulations indicate certain circulating core flows where liquid produced at the boundary of the inner core is fed into the outer core, moves upward toward the poles, and from there finally flows back inward (Fig. <a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v17\/142#f1\" class=\"\">1<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A \u201cLittle Earth Experiment\u201d inside a giant magnet sheds light on so-far-unexplained flow patterns in Earth\u2019s interior. Earth\u2019s inner core is a hot, solid ball\u2014about 20% of Earth\u2019s radius\u2014made of an iron alloy. The planet\u2019s outer core, beneath the rocky mantle, is a colder, liquid metal. Geophysics models explain that, since the movement of a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}