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Wednesday, February 9, 2022

What is the Earth's inner core made of?

 New studies of simulations of what the Earth's most inner core is made of suggest a strange form of matter - superionic matter - could exist. Superionic matter is a type of matter that has behaviors of both solid and liquid states. The inner core is at such ridiculous pressures and temperatures, no one has been able to confidently deduce what's there. 

Studies of earthquake waves passing through the core have some strange characteristics that have not been explained, and simulations with superionic material seem to be a better match to the recorded data. It seems that iron in the material would stay fixed in a lattice, like a solid, but then other types of atoms such as oxygen and hydrogen would flow through the lattice, more like a liquid. I would imagine this all could have some relevance to better understanding the earth's magnetic field production, depending on the nature of the flow and how ionic it may be, so we'll see in coming years what research shows. 

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