’New Hidden World’ Discovered in Earth’s Inner Core, Study Finds

In fact, research suggests that the Earth’s insides have certain semi-soft characteristics where liquid metal is stored — with multiple layers of hard metal, liquid metal, and a certain amount of material that’s halfway between the two.

Scientists have uncovered a “whole new hidden world” at the Earth’s solid inner core. The stunning discovery occurred as researchers studied wave ripples from earthquakes that move through the Earth.

A new study published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors on September 20 has changed the the consensus that surrounds the long belief of Earth’s inner core being a solid compressed ball of iron surrounded by a super-hot molten outer core.

"The more that we look at it, the more we realize it's not one boring blob of iron," Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "We're finding a whole new hidden world."

The study analyzed how shear waves created by earthquakes move through the globe into depths that neither humans or machines could venture into.

The distribution of seismic waves from earthquakes operated as a kind of “sonar” helped researchers like Rhett Butler, from the University of Hawaii and his colleague Seiji Tsuboib who works at Japan’s Centre for Earth Information Science and Technology, “see” inside the planet with detail.

Butler told Science Daily that the research was more than just academic interest and shed new light on the “composition, thermal history, and evolution of Earth.”