Earth’s core is cooling at rates faster than previously thought, which could speed the planet’s inevitable march toward uninhabitability millions or billions of years from now, researchers said this week.
Earth’s interior has been gradually cooling for the entirety of its 4.5 billion-year existence — a generally helpful pattern as the planet evolved into its current green paradise, where humans have thrived for the past 200,000 or so years.
“This perspective raises the question as to how fast the Earth has been losing heat throughout the Earth’s history, which directly links to the fundamental question on how long the Earth will remain dynamically active,” the scientists wrote in a paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.