Earth’s Core: Geophysics Of A Planet’s Deepest Interior

Earth’s core is the most remote part of our planet, recognized as a compositionally distinct region little more than a century ago. It remains the final frontier of our knowledge about Earth. Advances in seismology, computational and experimental mineral physics, geodynamics, geomagnetism, paleomagnetism, and geochemistry have made core research into a truly multidisciplinary effort. Exploration of the solar system has revealed iron-rich cores in all the terrestrial planets and several planetary satellites. Exoplanet exploration will doubtless reveal many more. Most observationally accessible of all cores, Earth’s offers great challenges for understanding its composition, structure, and dynamics. Molten iron at over 4000 K churns in the outer core to produce Earth’s magnetic field, and is compressed to a solid in the inner core to pressures that exceed three million times the atmospheric pressure. Research of Earth’s core requires applying known chemistry and physics to an extreme environment, while being open to new theories to explain surprising phenomena.
The aim of this book is twofold: to give the foundation required to investigate Earth’s core and to present the outstanding research questions. Our intended audience includes those at the beginning of their graduate studies. Few of the audience will have studied deep Earth geophysics in detail, having entered the field with disparate backgrounds in physics, geology, chemistry, mathematics, or engineering. While we assume our readers have a background in at least one of these disciplines, we endeavor to broaden their comprehension of other disciplines that bear on the core. This will, for example, enable an established researcher to appreciate more clearly the issues discussed at multidisciplinary meetings such as the Study of the Earth’s Deep Interior.