Published in Horizon, 5 Jan 2016
New experiments that crush material between two diamonds to simulate the extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures found in the earth’s interior are providing answers to the age-old questions of what our planet is made of, and where its ingredients came from.
‘We are measuring things that were not measured before,’ says geophysicist Prof. James Badro of the Paris Institute of Earth Physics, France.
Prof. Badro has been working with colleagues on the DECORE project, backed by the EU’s European Research Council (ERC), to understand the composition of the earth’s core. The core is thought to be mostly iron, yet analyses of seismic waves suggest that it is not dense enough to be iron on its own. […]
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