At the centre of the earth is a huge ball of liquid iron. It is always spinning and causes the earth to spin with it. Every few million/billion years the iron core shifts its direction of spin. When ...

All models of the generation of planetary magnetic fields include the same essential ingredients. There must be a region of electrically conducting fluid and an energy source to drive the motion of ...

Scientists have just plotted changes in Earth's axis through laboratory measurements. To do this, they constructed the world's most stable ring laser. Previously, scientists were only able to track ...

There are very few objects in the Universe that stand still; almost everything we know of rotates in some way. Every moon, planet, and star we know of spins on its own axis, meaning that there's no ...

Richard Gross, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, calculates that last week's earthquake off Japan's coast may have shortened the length of Earth's days by about 1.26 microseconds and shifted its ...

China’s massive Three Gorges Dam has reportedly caused a subtle but measurable shift in the Earth’s axis and a slight increase in the length of a day, an effect confirmed by scientists at NASA’s ...

The wobble of Earth’s axis is called precession. While most of us are familiar with our planet’s primary motions — rotation and revolution — few are aware of precession. This characteristic is vividly ...