Scientists believe that the Earth’s inner core has begun spinning in the opposite direction. Oh no! Birds will be flying backwards. The magnetic poles will split into 18 new compass points. James Cameron will start directing videos on how to fix appliances. It’ll be everything that movies have warned about! Except that they think it started happening around 2010 and it really hasn’t affected anything.
I have neither the genius nor the time to explain how they came to this conclusion, but it involved studying different models of core behavior, looking at ultra-specific types of seismographs, and something to do with earthquakes. In the end they say they’re 95 percent sure that the core started spinning the other way.
This made me think about the 2003 thriller, “The Core” starring Hillary Swank and Aaron Eckhart. And by “thriller”, I mean laughable mess. In it, the core stopped spinning leading to the Earth’s magnetic sphere failing and dooooooooom! But we were saved by the last minute invention of a vehicle that could drill through 1000s of miles of crust and hard rock mantle and then into the core. A core that has 3 million times the pressure of Earth’s surface, is around 10,000 degrees, and has a radius of about 2,000 miles. So, yeah, they got it spinning again with a nuke.
READ MORE about the scientists and their study by CLICKING HERE.