Liquid acoustics half way to the Earth's core

Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - 06:30 in Earth & Climate

The most direct information about the interior of the earth comes from measuring how seismic acoustic waves—such as those created by earthquakes—travel through the earth. Those measurements show that 95% of the earth's core is liquid. But, scientists also want to know the composition of the liquid, and that is harder. Now, in research published in Nature Communications, scientists from the Materials Dynamics Laboratory at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, along with collaborators from the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Earth-Life Science Institute and other institutes, have succeeded in measuring the speed of sound in mixtures of liquid iron and carbon in extreme conditions, allowing limits to be set on the core composition.

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