Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. She has covered weird animal behavior, space news and the impacts of ...

Earth's inner core is a roughly moon-size chunk of solid iron and nickel that lies more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) below our feet. It is surrounded by the outer core — a superhot layer ...

Scientists have raised concerns that the Earth's inner core may completely halt its rotation by 2040, according to a recent paper published in Nature. The study suggests changes are occurring deep ...

Some analyses even proposed that the core didn’t rotate at all. One promising model proposed in 2023 described an inner core that in the past had spun faster than Earth itself, but was now ...

Exactly when that will happen is being influenced by humans, according to a new study, as melting polar ice alters the Earth’s rotation and changes time itself. The hours and minutes that ...

The world is hungry for renewable sources of energy, which has led some scientists to ask the question: what about the rotation of the Earth? A new study reports that researchers have successfully ...

If this is hard to visualize, the image below should help. So how many times does the Earth actually rotate each year? The Earth rotates in the same direction as it orbits around the Sun, so that ...

STOCK PHOTO/Getty Images Since 1972, UTC has been modified by adding "leap seconds" when necessary, because the Earth's rotation rate is inconsistent, Britannica notes. The added second of UTC ...

More information: K. Ulrich Schreiber et al, Variations in the Earth's rotation rate measured with a ring laser interferometer, Nature Photonics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-023-01286-x ...

"This means that a shift in mass is taking place, and this is affecting the Earth's rotation," explains Benedikt Soja, Professor of Space Geodesy at the Department of Civil, Environmental and ...

NOAA Satellites A day is a period in which Earth makes a complete rotation around its axis. Although this averages out at 24 hours, the speed of this spin can actually increase or decrease ...