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Why is Earth pulsating every 26 seconds, and why canÂ’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mystery motion. It could be a harmonic phenomenon, a regular seismic chirp caused by the sunÂ’s energy, or a beacon drawing scientists to its source to begin a treasure hunt. âž¡ The world is weird. We'll show you how it works. In the early 1960s, a geologist named Jack Oliver first documented the pulse, also known as a "microseism," according to Discover. Oliver, who worked at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time, heard...

NASA's new Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft is a tiny satellite with the unique ability to capture images in X-ray with polarization and timing information for every photon captured. It's designed to operate for 2 years and capture new scientific measurements of some of the most extreme places in the universe with gravitational and magnetic fields that would destroy ordinary matter.And in an interesting turn of events the satellite switched from the intended launch vehicle to a cheaper option that nobody considered - the Falcon 9. This is the first time we've seen a rocket lauched from a domestic US...

NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

Using satellite data, researchers believe an "anomaly" in the South Atlantic may have split in two, with the eastern section "developing vigorously." Earth's magnetic field is generated by movements within the planet's molten iron core. ...When the magnetic field is stronger, it blocks more radiation. When it is weaker, more radiation reaches the planet's surface. The magnetic field is constantly moving. It strengthens and weakens as part of normal fluctuations. According to the European Space Agency, the magnetic field has lost around 9 percent of its strength over the preceding two centuries. One section of the magnetic field has been...

Anyone watching a compass needle point steadily north might suppose that Earth’s magnetic field is a constant. It’s not. Researchers have long known that changes are afoot. The north magnetic pole routinely moves, as much as 40 km/yr, causing compass needles to drift over time. Moreover, the global magnetic field has weakened 10% since the 19th century. Earth’s magnetic field protects us from solar storms and cosmic rays. Less magnetism means more radiation can penetrate our planet’s atmosphere. Indeed, high altitude balloons launched by Spaceweather.com routinely detect increasing levels of cosmic rays over California. Perhaps the ebbing magnetic field over...

he Bermuda Triangle and missing aircraft may seem like science fiction, but there is a well documented region off of the coast of Brazil that contains highly charged particles. This area is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly and is avoided at all costs by orbiting satellites. NASA satellites that do travel in the region are shut down, or go into SAFE mode to avoid damage while passing over the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa. The electrical field around earth protects us from cosmic rays. There are two bands that trap highly charged particles circle the earth. The protons trapped...

The faster growth under Indonesia's Banda Sea hasn't left the core lopsided. Gravity evenly distributes the new growth—iron crystals that form as the molten iron cools—to maintain a spherical inner core that grows in radius by an average of 1 millimeter per year. But the enhanced growth on one side suggests that something in Earth's outer core or mantle under Indonesia is removing heat from the inner core at a faster rate than on the opposite side, under Brazil. Quicker cooling on one side would accelerate iron crystallization and inner core growth on that side. This has implications for Earth's...

Astronomers have long struggled to pin down how long a day lasts on Venus, but new research suggests the difficulty stems not from flawed measurements but from real variations in the planet's spin.In a new study, scientists used a massive radar system to bounce lightwaves off our neighboring planet over the course of more than a decade. As a result, the researchers were able to measure how tilted Venus' axis is, how big its core is, and how long it takes the planet to complete one full rotation...Between 2006 and 2020, the team used this radar system to bounce a...

The African LLSVP. (Ward et al., Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 2020) NATURE Vast Fragments of an Alien World Could Be Buried Deep Within Earth Itself PETER DOCKRILL24 MARCH 2021 They are among the largest and strangest of all structures on Earth: huge, mysterious blobs of dense rock lurking deep within the lowermost parts of our planet's mantle. There are two of these gigantic masses – called the large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) – with one buried under Africa, the other below the Pacific Ocean. These anomalies are so massive, they in turn breed their own disturbances, such as the large phenomenon currently...

There's probably a fifth layer. (forplayday/iStock/Getty Images) NATURE Scientists Detect Signs of a Hidden Structure Inside Earth's Core TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS4 MARCH 2021 While most of us take the ground beneath our feet for granted, written within its complex layers, like pages of a book, is Earth's history. Our history. Now researchers have found more evidence for a whole new chapter deep within Earth's past - Earth's inner core appears to have another even more inner core within it. "Traditionally we've been taught the Earth has four main layers: the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core," explained...

A strange dent in Earth’s magnetic field doses orbiting craft with high levels of radiation. It's caused everything from periodic glitches to total mission failure. The European Space Agency’s Swarm satellites measure the strength of Earth’s magnetic field. In this image, cooler colors (blue) mean lower strength than warmer colors (pink). The large dark region is called the South Atlantic Anomaly Radiation is a colorless, tasteless, and odorless enemy to both humans and electronics alike. And, thanks to a quirk in Earth’s magnetic field, a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) regularly exposes orbiting spacecraft to high levels of...

As astronomers peering into Earth’s interior, there is no way for them to “feel” the true nature of the core. ... Scientists have long been on this quest, sometimes with fatal consequences. Explorers of old perished trying to set up monitoring stations in far-flung locales, like the doomed English explorer Sir John Franklin, whose expedition to take magnetic observations of the North Pole in 1845 ended with 129 men dead and two ships lost. As soon as long-lasting ground observatories sprung up around the world, scientists noticed strange deviations in the field, including for example, that our magnetic North and...

The scans for MH370 revealed that the ocean crust rises and falls in waves that start at the Southeast Indian Ridge and continue outward. The ridge spreads about 35 millimeters in opposite directions every year, and the wave crests, where crust grew faster, are more than 100 kilometers long and repeat every 10-14 kilometers. The researchers estimated when each wave formed by comparing the bathymetry maps to independent measurements and models of the crust's magnetic field. ...Crustal rocks record the polarity of Earth's magnetic field as they form, allowing scientists to trace the age of different sections of ocean crust....

Earthquakes generate seismic waves below Earth's surface that travel thousands of miles. When the waves encounter changes in rock density, temperature or composition, they change speed, bend or scatter, producing echoes that can be detected. Echoes from nearby structures arrive more quickly, while those from larger structures are louder. By measuring the travel time and amplitude of these echoes as they arrive at seismometers in different locations, scientists can develop models of the physical properties of rock hidden below the surface. This process is similar to the way bats echolocate to map their environment Using a machine learning algorithm called...

The location of Earth’s north magnetic pole appears to be controlled from deep within Earth by 2 competing blobs in the magnetic field. One is under Canada, and the other is under Siberia. “The Siberian blob is winning,” according to scientists. You probably know that a compass doesn’t point to true north. Earth’s geographic north pole – and magnetic north pole – were first recognized as two different places in 1831. Until the early 1990s, the magnetic North Pole was known to lie some 1,000 miles south of true north, in Canada. Yet, as scientists realized, the location of magnetic...

If you venture too close to one of Earth's poles, you'll notice something rather strange happening to any gadgets using radio waves, satellite connections, or GPS. NASA is backing a range of initiatives to investigate the northern polar cusp, a funnel in space that's thought to be behind some of the weird space phenomena happening above the poles. This funnel, and the matching one at the South Pole, allows solar winds from the Sun to get right down to Earth's atmosphere – in other words, here the solar winds aren't reflected back out into space by the Earth's magnetic field,...

The processes that led to glaciation at the cratered poles of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, have been modeled by a University of Maine-led research team. James Fastook, a UMaine professor of computer science and Climate Change Institute researcher, and James Head and Ariel Deutsch of Brown University, studied the accumulation and flow of ice on Mercury, and how the glacial deposits on the smallest planet in our solar system compare to those on Earth and Mars.Their findings, published in the journal Icarus, add to our understanding of how Mercury's ice accumulations—estimated to be less than 50 million...

Explanation: What's that under the surface of Mercury? The robotic MESSENGER spacecraft that had been orbiting planet Mercury for the past four years had been transmitting its data back to Earth with radio waves of very precise energy. The planet's gravity, however, slightly changed this energy when measured on Earth, which enabled the reconstruction of a gravity map of unprecedented precision. Here gravitational anomalies are shown in false-color, superposed on an image of the planet's cratered surface. Red hues indicate areas of slightly higher gravity, which in turn indicates areas that must have unusually dense matter under the surface. The...

One of the Moon's biggest craters was created by an asteroid more than 250km (150 miles) across, a study suggests. It smashed into the lunar surface about 3.8 billion years ago, forming Mare Imbrium - the feature also known as the right eye of the "Man in the Moon". Scientists say the asteroid was three times bigger than previously estimated and debris from the collision would have rained down on the Earth. The asteroid was so big it could be classified as a protoplanet - a space rock with the potential to become a fully formed world. Lead author Prof...

Lambart and her colleagues from Wales and the Netherlands, sought to discover what the mantle looks like before it rises as lava at a mid-ocean ridge. They examined cores, drilled through the ocean crust, to look at cumulate minerals: the first minerals to crystallize when the magmas enter the crust. They analyzed the samples centimeter by centimeter to look at variations in isotopes of neodymium and strontium, which can indicate different chemistries of mantle material that come from different types of rock. The amount of isotope variability in the cumulates was seven times greater than that in the mid-ocean ridge...