🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Seismic waves during earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and light waves from the Sun all have helped reveal fascinating insights about our planet’s mantle, crust, and core.
The final frontier isn’t space: It’s the Earth itself. We’ve sent people to the moon, robots to Mars and the New Horizons space probe 3.26 billion miles from Earth to snap photos of Pluto, while just 4,000 miles beneath our feet, unfathomable heat and pressure keep the center of the Earth tantalizingly out of reach.
Deeper in the mantle, heat and pressure reconfigure the atoms making up olivine into two new minerals, bridgmanite and ferropericlase, which are brownish-orange and yellow at room temperature. Beneath the rocky mantle, there’s an outer core of churning liquid iron surrounding an inner core of solid iron that’s about 70 percent the size of the moon.
Lekić likens seismology to the way we use X-rays to see inside the human body — the different densities of our muscles, organs, and bone mean that the X-rays travel through them in different ways. “We can’t send X-rays through the Earth, because the X-rays won’t make it all the way through,” he says. “Instead, we use seismic waves.”Earthquakes send ground vibrations throughout our planet, and they travel across the world in different ways.
The light shows there's a lot of silicon, oxygen, magnesium and iron, along with other elements like potassium and calcium, Campbell says. The relative amounts of elements in the sun is similar to what we see in certain primitive meteorites, he adds, which “reinforces our understanding that these primitive meteorites represent the building blocks from which we can assemble terrestrial planets. And that includes Earth.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
From the Depths of Earth: Seismic Waves May Unlock Gravity’s SecretsScientists are investigating the use of Earth's seismic motions to test alternative models of gravity beyond Einstein's general theory of relativity. By analyzing seismic waves under modified gravity, researchers can constrain these theories and continue the search for a more complete understanding
Read more »
Could a rogue planet destroy the Earth?Rogue planets that float freely through space without a star to orbit are very difficult for astronomers to detect.
Read more »
Earth Day 2023: Taking a look at Chicago environmental groups in Little Village, Altgeld GardensNeighborhoods like Little Village, where a botched implosion of a smoke stack in 2020 covered the area in dust and debris, are the focus.
Read more »
What Will a Betelgeuse Supernova Look Like From Earth?🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Astronomers simulated what humans will see on Earth when the star Betelgeuse explodes as a supernova sometime in the next 100,000 years.
Read more »
Earth Day 2023: 23 inspiring ways to celebrate in HoustonThe Houston area offers several ways to celebrate the natural world. You can eat oysters, walk for the wild, purchase plants, buy a book, or participate in a beach cleanup.
Read more »
University of Houston celebrating Earth Day with events all weekThe University of Houston will be celebrating Earth Day with events going on all this week at their campus.
Read more »