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wazoheat t1_j5oxpe7 wrote

Reply to comment by FootballImpossible38 in What are the forces on Earth’s Inner Core that change its speed? by BayRunner

The core is not stopping or reversing it's course. That would be impossible due to being a violation of conservation of momentum.

The study that has been making it's rounds in the media suggests that the core has slightly changed it's rotational velocity relative to the surface, so that it is now spinning slightly slower compared to the surface rather than slightly faster as has been previously noted. They also show evidence that this may be a cycle that reverses every few decades. This is unrelated to the magnetic dynamo of the earth and it's roughly 100,000-year cycles.

The media coverage on this study is probably the worst I have ever seen. It's a very simple concept to explain, but if you explain it correctly it's boring, so I have to imagine that the journalists involved are being wilfully mislead, writing willfully misleading articles, or some combination of both.

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CrustalTrudger t1_j5p2vp7 wrote

It's really bad. Even the publisher is making pretty misleading comments about the paper, like this tweet from Nature that pretty much implies that the inner core is somehow not rotating at all or rotating in an opposite direction.

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