Hidden planet..

I always imagined the inner core of the earth to be a smooth hot ball of metal 'thats what my
textbooks at school always said at least' But after watching the latest episode of the excellent
BBC Horizon programme its quite clear the truth is far more amazing than anyone ever realized.

Professor Kei Hirose of the tokyo institute of technology has recreated the conditions found at
the Earth's core in his laboratory at the SPring-8 synchrotron near Osaka, Japan. A sample of
the material thought to make up the Earth's core, iron-nickel alloy, was subjected to three
million times atmospheric pressure and heated to about 4,500C, resulting in the rapid growth of
crystals. What his results suggest is that the core is a planet buried within the planet we know, where storms rage within a sea of white-hot metal and a giant forest of crystals make up a metal core the size of the Moon. Some of these metal/crystals are 10km long, fascinating stuff. You can watch Horizon-The Core here on iplayer [uk residents only] www.bbc.co.uk...

nice find gunna watch that right now!

second!

uk residents only

When will the BBC realize that the whole world might have an interest in some of the videos on their website?

reply to post by Grey Magic


why should everyone else get free access to the content that brittish citizens pay for ?

the BBC generates considerable revenue selling its content to overseas networks

let them [ the overseas buyers ] host the content they have bought on thier free to view internet systems

reply to post by ignorant_ape


Because it sometimes takes years before they are bought and broadcast, or never bought and broadcasted at all.

You can seen any program that the public network in the Netherlands made outside of the Netherlands on the internet, but to be honest, the quality of the Dutch programs is a lot lower than the BBC has.

I don't think it will make such a big difference in bandwidth nowadays that it will cost the BBC a fortune.

And I can remember BBC saying years ago that they were working into making their online streams available outside of the UK.

GM

having watch the entire episode (and a better one from horizon on telescopes) i can say that actually very little about the actual inner core is really got into.

The scientist ususes two diamonds to hold a shard of the alloy "sceince belives the inner core is most likly to be made from (aka iron-nickle alloy)" which he then compressed with a vice like device to 3 million psi, he then puts the device in a very high powered infrared laser from a syncrotron installation, and heats the alloy to 4k kelvin thus simulating the inner core inviroment, then obverses the data.

Long story short this extremely high pressure metal alloy, which is crystaline in atomic sizes, moltern and liquid at high temprature, once again takes a crystaline form once the temprature and pressure are increased futher.

This means that the solid inner core is made up of these crystal structures like trees in a forest, projecting into the liquid outter/inner core.

The first 30 mins of the documentary was about how the sceintists found out the inner core is solid and not all liquid. Looking at wolrd data from seismographs, scientists noticed a slowed responce in waves, a shadow of slowed weaves about the size of the moon at the core from the oposite side of the world during an eather quake there. Using what they know about speeds of waves through rock, magma and liquid metal, they determined the inner most be more solid, which led to the experiment above.

I hope that fills you guys not in the UK in ok.

reply to post by Biigs


Thanks for the summary, this documentary sparked my interest after the news that a huge underground ocean was found.

Originally posted by Grey Magic
reply to post by Biigs

 

Thanks for the summary, this documentary sparked my interest after the news that a huge underground ocean was found.

wowzers has that got its own thread yet, cos i think you are in for some flags and stars if you make one!!!

Im looking up this as we speak, great stuff!

Oh and you are welcome for my dyslexic review of the programme,

reply to post by Biigs


Yeah there was a thread about it but couldn't find it back.