Who cares what it is about, just know that it’s beautiful:

A study published this week in Nature bears out that trend in a spectacular way. At the centre of the Earth, below the mountains and the oceans and the thin, brittle crust, below the stony, slow-flowing mantle and the roiling outer core of liquid iron, is a solid inner core. If anything about the planet looked unlikely to partake in a process of endless recycling, you might think this ball of metal, 1,200 kilometres across, squeezed from every direction by a planet’s worth of weight, would be it—a dense static hub about which all else turns.

Scientists have known for some time that this inner core is not unchanging. But they had thought that it changed in only one direction—that it simply grew bigger. The Earth is growing cooler as it loses the heat trapped in its creation and generated by radioactive elements within it. It is in fact this cooling which powers the slow circulation of the mantle, and through that the endless remaking of the surface through plate tectonics. As things cool down, the liquid outer core freezes into the solid inner core. It is thought that this process leads the inner core to grow larger at a rate of roughly 30 centimetres a century.

Endlessly beautiful:

That said, even if further evidence backs it up, the idea that the inner core is in a continuous cycle of self recreation probably won’t matter that much to the landscapes and ecosystems doing similar things 5,000 kilometres further out. The effect is more one of underlining an aesthetic, or even an ideology, of the planet as an engine of ceaseless self-stabilising change. Such an ideology may serve as a useful guide to dealing with the unavoidable impacts that a large technological civilisation must have on the planet it inhabits: while caution counsels minimising such impacts, a sense of how the planet works suggests that making sure its natural systems can deal with them, that they can become part of the flow, could matter just as much.

That may seem too farfetched. Sufficient, perhaps, just to stop and think how strange it is that the inner core, imperviously locked away since the creation of the world, may yet be added to the long list of other solid-looking things, such as the Himalayas and the Atlantic Ocean and the planet itself, that are in some ways better understood not as places, but as processes.

I live for writing like this.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

7 replies on “Utterly Beautiful Writing in the Economist”

  3. It’s going to look fine when the crust wrinkles and we all die in the Billionaires Tunnel sealed in by Seven Gates for Seven Brothers.

    Then we can take out our Magic Circles and look down at it while we die – alone – underwater – knowing that death awaits us.

  5. I find it awe inspiring how everything on and in this planet, from the smallest life to the very core, all move in harmony. All the universe seems to have met in this one spot and found harmonious balance. From the elements to the sun itself, all in balance. We are the only thing that disturbs that balance,that rhythm of time and existence.

Comments are closed.