Earth's Core: A Moon-Sized Crystal Ball
2011年6月30日 上午 02:44:58
Translation by Autumnson Blog
地震學家發現地球內核心在旋轉
Seismologists discover that the inner core rotates
Researchers are now probing what may turn out to be the most curious small body the solar system has yet presented for scrutiny: a globe the size of the moon that appears to be a well ordered crystalline entity. This body is poised little more than 5,000 kilometers away, yet it is completely invisible. Located at the center of the earth, it is known simply as the inner core. Two seismologists have just shown that this strange crystal sphere is turning slowly within the rocky and liquid metal enclosure that keeps it all but hidden from scientific investigation.
研究人員現正在探索，可能是太陽系有的最好奇小體是，那仍未提交審議的：一個月球大小的球體，看來是一個良好有序的結晶實體，這小體平衡在距離5,000公里多一點的路程，然而卻是完全看不見的，因為它位於地球的中心，僅是已知的內核。兩位地震學家剛剛展示，這個奇怪的水晶球體在岩石和液態金屬的外殼內緩慢地轉動，那包住它但卻使它躲藏科學的考察。
Geophysicists realised decades ago that a solid inner core exists, but they knew precious little else about it. They believed the inner core and the liquid shell surrounding it were made largely of iron, yet other features of the heart of the planet remained enigmatic.
地球物理學家數十年前就認知到一個固態內核的存在，但他們知道非常少關於它的其它。他們認為，內核心和周圍的液體外殼主要是由鐵製造，然而地球心臟的其它特徵依然是謎。
But during the 1980s, seismologists examining earthquake waves that pierce the inner core made a startling find. Rather than being "isotropic" (the same in all directions) in its physical properties, the inner core proved to be somewhat like a piece of wood, with a definite grain running through it. Waves traveling along the planet's north-south axis go 3 to 4 percent faster through the inner core than those that follow paths close to the equatorial plane.
但在20世紀 80年代，地震學家研究穿透內核的地震波，得出驚人的發現。在物理特性方面與其它是“等向的”（在各個方向同樣），內核被證明是有點像一塊木頭，具有一定的紋理運行通過它。波沿地球的南北軸線走，3至4％穿過內核快於那些跟隨近赤道平面的路徑。
Geophysicists have struggled to explain why this grain (or "seismic anisotropy") should exist. The leading theory is that at the immense pressures of the inner core, iron takes on a hexagonal crystal form that has inherently directional physical properties. Some force apparently keeps the hexagonal iron crystals all in close alignment.
地球物理學家一直在努力解釋為什麼這紋理（或“地震各向異性”）應該存在。領先的理論是，在內芯的巨大壓力下，鐵呈硯一種六角形晶體形態，天性地具有定向的物理本質，某種力量表面地在保持六角形鐵晶體全部密切對齊。
Lars Stixrude of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Ronald E. Cohen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington note that whatever texturing mechanism operates to form the anisotropic grain of the inner core, it must be almost 100 percent efficient. Otherwise the seismic anisotropy would not be as large as measured. "The very strong texturing indicated by our results suggests the possibility that the inner core is a very large single crystal," they boldly stated in an article published last year in Science.
喬治亞理工學院的拉爾斯 Stixrude和華盛頓卡內基研究所的羅納德 E.科恩指出，無論是什麼的紋理機制去運作形成內在核心的各向異性紋理，它必須是幾乎100％有效率的。否則，地震各向異性將不會是如量度般那樣大。“我們的結果所顯出的非常強勁紋理提出一可能性，內在核心是一非常大的單一水晶體”，他們大膽地在去年的科學的一篇文章中發表。
The seemingly absurd notion - that a body the size of the moon could be just one big crystal - is less ridiculous than it sounds. The central core may have grown gradually to its present size as liquid iron at the bottom of the outer core solidified and attached itself to the inner core. That process would occur exceedingly slowly, with few outside disturbances - just like the conditions that favor the growth of large crystals in a lab. Slow solidification of iron might have allowed the inner core to grow quietly for billions of years, becoming in the end a gargantuan single crystal, more than 2,400 kilometers across.
But slow crystal growth does not explain the alignment of the inner core's axis of anisotropy with the earth's rotation axis. The process also fails to account for the seismological evidence that the anisotropic grain is not uniform. Xiaodong Song, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, says that the anisotropy at the top of the inner core "is likely to be very weak - less than 1 percent." So it would seem that some other physical mechanism must keep the deeper hexagonal iron crystals in line.
Although several explanations have been proposed, the most reasonable theory calls on internal stress (generated by the earth's rotation), which is strongest along the north-south axis. Thus, the hexagonal iron that constitutes the inner core could crystalise (or recrystalise) in parallel with the spin axis - as do the mica flakes that form in rocks squeezed by tectonic forces. Internal stress could thus keep the inner core's grain well aligned with the spin axis - perhaps too well aligned. It turns out that the grain of the inner core is not exactly parallel to the earth's rotation axis: in 1994 Wei-jia Su and Adam M. Dziewonski of Harvard University reported that the axis of anisotropy is in fact tilted by about 10 degrees.
At about the same time, Gary A. Glatzmaier of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Paul H. Roberts of the University of California at Los Angeles were working on a computer simulation of how the earth's magnetic field operates. Although the tumultuous churning of the outer core's liquid iron creates this magnetic field, Glatzmaier and Roberts found that the influence of the solid inner core was needed for proper stability. Their modeling also indicated that the inner core may be shifting slowly eastward with respect to the earth's surface, impelled by persistent fluid motions at the base of the outer core.
Reading that result and realizing that the seismic grain of the inner core was not wholly aligned with the spin axis, Song and his colleague Paul G. Richards decided to look for seismic evidence that the canted grain of the inner core was indeed swiveling around relative to the rest of the earth. Their idea was to examine seismic recordings of waves that traveled through the inner core decades ago and to compare them with more recent signals. If the core rotates, the time it takes these waves to traverse the inner core should change systematically. The challenge was to find recordings of seismic waves that passed close to the north-south axis and to devise a way to compare them precisely enough to detect the slight differences that result from less than 30 years of change (the span of seismic records). But they solved both problems and found evidence of rotation quite quickly. "Everything happened in three weeks," Richards notes.
The team started by looking at seismic traces recorded in Antarctica caused by nuclear tests made at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Arctic. Traveling from one pole to another, these seismic waves penetrated the core. Examining data that had been collected over the course of a decade, Song and Richards observed what appeared to be a change of two tenths of a second in the travel time of the waves that passed through the inner core as compared with those that just skirted it. They then scrutinized a set of seismic recordings made in Alaska of earthquakes that occurred between the tip of South America and Antarctica and found similar results to confirm that the inner core was in fact moving. They presented their discovery in the July 18 issue of Nature.
Although the detection of inner core movement was itself a remarkable experimental achievement, the correspondence in direction and speed of this motion (eastward at a degree or two a year) with the predictions of Glatzmaier and Roberts was more remarkable still. But geophysicists are far from having figured out the workings of the inner core. No one yet understands for sure what causes its anisotropic grain. Nor can scientists explain why the anisotropy should be tilted. According to Glatzmaier, "It's anybody's guess at this point."
Source
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/764/292/Earths_Core:_A_Moon-Sized_Crystal_Ball.html
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