Nature Geoscience published a study on 13 January, saying that the Earth’s inner core might have started spinning in the opposite direction.
At the time of writing, there isn’t much known about what effect the reverse spinning of the core might have on the planet.
Nature Geoscience’s study was done via analysis of seismic waves from earthquakes over the last 60 years.
The authors of the study, Xiaodong Song and Yi Yang from Peking University, told AFP that the inner core had almost stopped rotating in 2009, before it started spinning in the other direction.
The Earth had previously spun the other way in the 1970s, before it changed direction, and the authors of the study had predicted the next change in direction (after the present one) is expected to be in the 2040s.
The authors said that they hope their study can motivate researchers to build and test models which treat the whole planet as an integrated dynamic system.
They suggested that all of the earth’s layers might be linked physically, from the surface all the way to the inner core.