The stuff that scary tales are made of

In his classic science fiction novel, A Journey into the Centre of the Earth, French writer Jules Verne tells a story about an eccentric German scientist who believes there are volcanic tubes that reach to the very centre of the earth. In his quest for his missing brother, the scientist, his nephew and their mountain guide discover a fantastic and dangerous lost world beneath the earth’s crust.

Such an exciting tale is the product of imagination. The truth is more prosaic. At the centre of the planet is a spherical core of iron and nickel, about 1,500 miles in diametre, surrounded by a layer of molten metal, allowing the iron-nickel core to spin.

Many scientists believe that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet, but sometime in the past decade, it seemed to have stopped, or even reversed. Yet, this is not a new phenomenon

Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, seismologists at Beijing University, reported their findings from their recent study Multidecadal variation of the Earth’s inner-core rotation to Nature Geoscience late last month.

“We were quite surprised,” they said, just as the public were astounded by apocalypse-laden headlines in the popular science press.

Yang and Song compared temporal changes between repeated seismic waves believed to be travelling the same path through the inner core. Even if their findings are correct, any effect on life would be negligible.

Of course, learning more about the earth’s core will help us understand and predict changes in the planet’s movement and magnetic fields. Unfortunately, the media used the findings to scare audiences. Getting the eyes on websites and articles is the name of the game, but scientists can also exploit half-baked headlines and distortions to obtain funding for further research to put the public right, until the next wave of scare-mongering. The occasional asteroid-coming-too-close-in five-years is a great stand-by, albeit a Hollywood cliché. Some members of the scientific community also try to use the media to spread their views against the consensus of the scientific community. 

The latest assumption about the earth’s core may not affect life on the surface of the earth, but what if? Hey presto! A trailer showing desertified landscapes, the Giza pyramids eroded by acid rain, cockroaches the size of Godzilla, and purple skies. When the Core Stops Turning coming to a cinema near you. After 90 minutes of that, maybe you’ll feel the earth move.