James Stewart

As for what causes this change, scientists aren't yet certain.

Possibly the magnetic field of the liquid outer core could drag on the solid iron within, speeding it up or slowing it down.

While gravity from dense regions in the mantle could pull on variations in the inner core affecting its rotation.

But what does that mean for us?

Do we need to worry about this?

Well, remember how I said earlier that the inner core is like the boiler room of our planet?

Well, it turns out that changes in its behavior do seem to correlate with other phenomena on the surface.

The authors of the 2023 study noticed that 70-year oscillation coincides with fluctuations in the length of a day and changes in the magnetic field.

And beyond that, they even linked them to changes in global mean temperature and sea level.

But before you're too alarmed, we're talking about tiny changes here.

A thousandth of a second here.

A fraction of a degree there.

Certainly not enough to explain global warming.

The long story short is it's early days.

Scientists are continuing to study the inner core and its impacts on the world above.

And with every passing year yielding more and more seismic data ripe for analysis, new insights are only a matter of time.

Perhaps Inge Lehmann put it best.

A few years before her death, at the ripe old age of 104, she wrote, The first results for the properties of the inner core were naturally approximate.

Much has been written about it, but the last word has probably not yet been said.

Let me know in the comments what you think of this.