About 2,890 kilometres beneath our feet lies a gigantic ball of liquid metal: our planet’s core. Scientists like me use the seismic waves created by earthquakes as a kind of ultrasound to “see” the shape and structure of the core.
Using a new way of studying these waves, my colleague Xiaolong Ma and I have made a surprising discovery: there is a large donut-shaped region of the core around the Equator, a few hundred kilometres thick, where seismic waves travel about 2% slower than in the rest of the core.
We think this region contains more lighter elements such as silicon and oxygen, and may play a crucial role in the vast currents of liquid metal running through the core that generate Earth’s magnetic field. Our results are published today in Science Advances.
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