Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 12/08/2010 12:01:06 PM PST by NormsRevenge
What may be a new outermost layer of the Earth's core has been found, geoscientists have revealed.
This discovery could help solve mysteries of the planet's magnetic field, researchers say.
The Earth's core is composed mainly of iron, divided into a solid inner center roughly 1,500 miles (2,440 kilometers) wide covered by a liquid outer layer about 1,400 miles (2,250 km) thick. Even though the bulk of the core is iron, researchers also knew it contained a small amount of lighter elements such as oxygen and sulfur. As the inner core crystallized over time, scientists think this process forced out most of these light elements, which then migrated through the liquid outer core.
Now geoscientists think they have detected all these light elements concentrated in the outermost parts of the core.
"Ever since core structure started to be studied, there were hints of structure there — that's why we looked for it," said researcher George Helffrich, a geologist and seismologist at the University of Bristol in England.
Seismic speed changes
To investigate the core, researchers monitored seismic waves that traveled through its outer layer. The waves were generated by earthquakes in South America and the southwestern Pacific Ocean, and were recorded using arrays of seismometers in Japan and northern Europe.
The speeds at which seismic waves traveled through the outer core at different depths suggest that its composition does not remain the same all the way through. Instead, the uppermost 185 miles (300 km) or so is a distinct structure, with the section nearest the boundary consisting up to 5 percent by weight of light elements.
"The seismic structure we found is hard to deny — the signal is obvious to the eye in the data that we used," Helffrich told OurAmazingPlanet.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Probably. But I'd like to know how it got there, from the swirling clouds of hydrogen that sort of clumped together to form the proto-planets I mean.
ML/NJ
From the millions of degrees of heat down there, heat turns hydrogen into iron, just ask Al “baby doc” Gore, it’s just releasing it’s inner Chakra........
ML/NJ
They always have a supply of the heavier elements.
That stuff comes in the form of tiny dust particles in and amongst the gas clouds.
Eventually gravity pulls it back together; it all heats up; the dust particles melt from the heat of gravitational compaction; and suddenly it all settles out with most of the heaviest stuff at the bottom (uranium, gold, iron), and the lighter stuff at the top (silicon, carbon, nitrogen).
From that point on it just takes a bit of time to resettle more of these materials until you get a hard surface crust.
We get the rest of our iron and other heavy metals through collisions with smaller bodies ~ small planets, meteors, moons, space junk, and so on.
ping
Sure it does!
You don't really beleive this stuff, do you?
ML/NJ
memo to self: Use spell checker even for small posts.
The accessibility of those bands may well ultimately affect the value of gold and totally debase the stuff.
There are so many ways we can take simple "light" to torch stuff I can't begin to list them all.
Now, do you dispute the Bible? Do you doubt that God can make galaxies, suns, planets, layers of post collision melt in the bowels of the Earth?
Yes, it does. Fire ants. A very thick layer too.
I suddenly have a craving for Scotch.
http://paranormal.about.com/od/hollowearth/a/aa022206.htm
Aluminum, Super-sonic, Nazi-hell creatures from the center of the hollow Earth are gonna eat us all...
Ok, maybe not. I just thought I’d throw that out there. ;-)
Now we know where nougat REALLY comes from.
The planets weren't formed from 'swirling clouds of hydrogen'. If you are serious you can google and find some nice resources on star and planet formation. Really quite interesting.
True.
We are literally made from the dust of stars.
It's the best explanation so far.
I don't pretend to know, unlike most people.
ML/NJ
Yeah. Sort of like wondering what keeps airplanes up in the air. One possibility is that the tooth fairy does it; and the other is that planes harness the gravitation forces of extraterestial bodies. One of those is best too.
ML/NJ
Actually it is because airplane wings deflect particles of the air in a downward motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
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