Geologists have long known that Earth’s core, some 1,800 miles beneath our feet, is a dense, chemically doped ball of iron roughly the size of Mars and every bit as alien.
Author Jules Verne portrayed the Earth's core as an alien landscape, but what is really down there ?
While you aren't likely to find dinosaurs and giant mushrooms in the center of the planet, what is down there is every bit as strange. 1800 miles beneath our feet is a giant ball of iron the size of Mars where the pressure is 3.5 million times that of the surface and temperatures are as hot as the Sun.
New things are being learned about the inside of our planet all the time, recent research for example has highlighted that the outer layers of the core are frittering away heat through conduction up to three times faster than previously thought. "From what I can tell, people are excited," said Dr. Dario Alfè. "They see there might be a new mechanism going on they didn’t think about before."
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