This is what the Earth inside looks like: Deep down lies the core of the Earth, followed by the Earth's mantle. The Earth's crust begins 35 kilometres below the surface.
New findings on the Earth's magnetic field: researchers show that the iron oxide hematite remains magnetic deep within the Earth's mantle / Study published in "Nature" journal The huge magnetic field which surrounds the Earth, protecting it from radiation and charged particles from space - and which many animals even use for orientation purposes - is changing constantly, which is why geoscientists keep it constantly under surveillance. The old well-known sources of the Earth's magnetic field are the Earth's core - down to 6,000 kilometres deep down inside the Earth - and the Earth's crust: in other words, the ground we stand on. The Earth's mantle, on the other hand, stretching from 35 to 2,900 kilometres below the Earth's surface, has so far largely been regarded as "magnetically dead". An international team of researchers from Germany, France, Denmark and the USA has now demonstrated that a form of iron oxide, hematite, can retain its magnetic properties even deep down in the Earth's mantle. This occurs in relatively cold tectonic plates, called slabs, which are found especially beneath the western Pacific Ocean. "This new knowledge about the Earth's mantle and the strongly magnetic region in the western Pacific could throw new light on any observations of the Earth's magnetic field," says mineral physicist and first author Dr. Ilya Kupenko from the University of Münster (Germany). The new findings could, for example, be relevant for any future observations of the magnetic anomalies on the Earth and on other planets such as Mars.
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