A team of physicists from the Carnegie Institute in Washington, headed by Alexander Goncharov, a former employee of the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, set up an experiment to study the properties of the Earth's solid core. The study helped to find out the more accurate age of the formation of this structure in the center of our planet and to study its properties.
The earth's core consists of two layers - the outer liquid and the solid, located in the very center of the planet. As a result of thermonuclear reactions, the solid core releases an enormous amount of energy, which makes the liquid layer move. This movement generates a magnetic field that surrounds our planet, it saves us from the deadly solar wind and makes compasses work.
However, despite a fairly thorough study of all the principles of the magnetic field, many things remained a mystery to scientists. Most of all, physicists were outraged by the so-called "new paradox of the nucleus", discovered in 2012. At that time, paleomagnetic studies were carried out, as a result of which "traces" of the magnetic field were found more than 3.5 billion years ago, although it was previously believed that a solid iron core, without which the generation of the field is impossible, was formed much later, about 1.5 billion years ago.
In order to explain this paradox, physicists have carried out a study of the thermal conductivity of the solid layer of the earth's core. It consists almost entirely of iron, but its properties under the influence of colossal pressure and high temperatures are radically different from the iron we are used to on the surface of the Earth. Based on this fact, the scientists conducted an experiment with an iron blank placed between two diamond "anvils". A compressive force was transferred to the sample, and due to the high hardness of the diamonds, the strongest pressure was created (from 345 thousand to 1.3 million atmospheres). The required temperature (more than 2.5 thousand degrees Celsius) was provided by a laser passing through a transparent diamond.
Thus, physicists have repeated the conditions in which the nucleus is located. Having studied the properties of the workpiece subjected to such tests, it was found that iron in the center of the Earth has an extremely low thermal conductivity, which means that the magnetic field began its work from the very birth of our planet.
Evgeniy Kolodiychak
