Secrets of 'Paatal Lok': Scientists try to uncover mysteries of Earth’s core

A recent report by a team from the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology had analysed the waves sent by large earthquakes. The team of scientists had stumbled on to the conclusion that the Earth’s inner core is not a solid sphere of iron as had been earlier thought. The study found that Earth’s inner core, with temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun and pressure an outrageous 360 million times more than we experience on the Earth’s surface, isn’t exactly in the state that was accepted in the scientific community up until now.

Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the England's University of Bristol, had commented on the research saying, “We're finding a whole new hidden world.” Earth’s inner core is akin to the underworld, known as ‘Paatal Lok’ in Hindi, has hidden mysteries that we may never be able to directly observe but scientists are now trying to recreate the same circumstances to find out how extreme pressure and heat in the Earth’s inner core works differently on matter.

In new research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University, scientists attempted to recreate the extremities deep inside Earth with the help of laser technology. The findings from the experiment were published in the journal Physical Review Letters in a paper titled “Femtosecond Visualization of hcp-Iron Strength and Plasticity under Shock Compression”.

The researchers were unable to get the conditions of the extreme interiors but were able to recreate what it would be like in the outer core of Earth in a remarkable achievement. No one has ever observed what happens to iron when subjected to such extreme pressure and temperature.

Co-author of the research, Arianna Gleason, a scientist in the High-Energy-Density Science (HEDS) Division at SLAC explained what happens as quoted by Inverse, “The iron doesn’t know what to do with this extra stress. And it needs to relieve that stress, so it tries to find the most efficient mechanism to do that.”

The iron undergoes a phenomenon called “twinning,” where it becomes extraordinarily strong initially but loses the strength as time continues after which it “starts to flow plastically on much longer time scales,” she added.

The researchers are happy with the outcome and having been able to successfully measure changes happening at extremely fast speeds. Lead researcher Sébastien Merkel, Université de Lille, said, “The fact that the twinning happens on the time scale that we can measure it as an important result in itself.”

The researchers hope to recreate even the inner core of Earth in future with the advancement in laser technology.