Earth's core catches a wave

A journey to Earth's center would take us through the crust, the mantle, and then two regions of the core. Innermost of those is an iron crystalline solid; surrounding that is a freely flowing, conducting fluid, capped by a thin boundary layer that abuts the rocky mantle. The presence of the fluid core is deduced from seismic studies, and its dynamics can be extracted—with a few assumptions—from time-dependent observations of Earth's surface magnetic field (see Physics Today, February 2008, page 31). A new study does just that, by using nearly 150 years' worth of surface magnetic measurements to determine the magnetic flux in the liquid core. Motions there are modeled with a set of 20 nested cylinders coaxial with Earth's rotation axis and the key assumption that fluid waves in the core must balance Lorentz, Coriolis, buoyancy, and pressure forces. Jean Dickey (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Olivier de Viron (Institute of Earth Physics, Paris, and University Paris Diderot) found four robust modes of angular-momentum oscillations corresponding to waves—with periods of 85, 50, 35, and 28 years and diminishing amplitudes—that propagate inward from the core–mantle boundary. There was some previous observational evidence for two of the modes, and theorists had predicted all four modes having similar periods. Now, the strong concurrence of all the results lends credibility to the new modes' existence. (J. O. Dickey, O. de Viron, Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L15302, 2009.) —Stephen G. Benka