Scientists discover doughnut-shaped structure hidden in Earth’s outer core (Photo: NASA)
Scientists have discovered a doughnut-like structure inside the Earth. outer coreThe discovery, made by a research team, was reported in a new study published in Scientific advancesThe discovery was made by a research team after analyzing seismic waves generated by large earthquakes.
Professor Hrvoje Tkalčić, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, said the seismic waves detected are slower in the newly discovered region, compared to the remaining liquid outer core.
“The region lies parallel to the equatorial plane, is confined to low latitudes and is shaped like a doughnut,” he said, as quoted by Phys.Org. “We don’t know the exact thickness of the doughnut, but we infer that it is located a few hundred kilometers below the core-mantle boundary.”
“By understanding the geometry of the wave paths and how they traverse the volume of the outer core, we reconstructed their travel times through the Earth, showing that the newly discovered region has low seismic velocities,” he added.
“Here, we present evidence for a low-velocity volume within the outer core via the global coda correlation wavefield. Several key features of the correlogram with unique sensitivity to the liquid core show variations with noticeably slower wave paths in equatorial than in polar planes. We constrain a torus structure at low latitudes with a velocity ~2% lower than that of the surrounding liquid outer core via waveform modeling. We propose a thermochemical origin for a low-velocity torus, providing important constraints on the dynamical processes of Earth’s outer core,” they added.
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