Today, you are a member of… Super Rotation
Though we tend to think of ourselves as 3-dimensional creatures, members, we hairless apes have only traveled as far out as 328,857 miles (one Lunar Distance) and only as far in as 7.62 miles (the deepest drill at the Kola Superdeep Borehole), making us almost 2-dimensional by universe standards. But rather than accepting our seeeming shallowness, Xiaodong Song & Paul Richards, two anistrophic seismologists, did a study of the earth’s core by measuring earthquake wave travel time. They found that indeed, compressional elastic waves traverse the inner core faster longitudinally than latitudinally and extrapolated a core superrotation that equals one extra go-round compared to that of the mantle every 900 years. So this week, if you feel yourself spinning all whack it’s because 1) you are in fact, three-dimensional and 2) there’s more to your seismology than meets the surface-dwelling eye.
