Researchers are building models to simulate the Earth’s core. From CNRS News:
Take a journey to the center of the Earth—as far as its outer core, at least—and you’ll find a swirling mass of metal, mainly iron, kept in liquid form by the region’s intense heat. Temperature and pressure variations across this layer cause the melted metal to rise in hotter zones and to sink in cooler ones—convection movements that generate electric currents through the metal, and in turn, magnetic fields. Pair these convective motions with the Earth’s rotation on its axis and you have a large-scale dynamo effect: the spinning aligns the convective motions which now cooperate to produce one big magnetic field, ultimately creating the shield that blocks out solar wind.
I’m still not entirely sure what I’m looking at, but I like it.
