Self-Destruction

Ready or not here we come! This week, you are a super smart, fancy scientist who finds something horrifying wrong with Earth…the magnetic fields are about to collapse. Can you and your team fix it or will the planet face its doom?

 In the movie, The Core, scientists Dr. Josh Keyes, Dr. Serge Leveque, and Dr. Conrad Zimsky find an instability of Earth’s magnetic field after a series of bizarre events. They conclude that the Earth’s core, which generates this field, has stopped rotating and the magnetic field will collapse. Which would have detrimental effects on the planet. Backed by the U.S. government, Keyes, Leveque, and Zimsky create a plan to restart the rotation with a series of nuclear explosions. They gain the help of a mildly crazy scientist Dr. Ed “Braz” Brazzelton, who has devised a vessel that can withstand the heat and pressure within the Earth’s crust and convert it to energy. Construction starts immediately. They compile a crew of pilots, scientists, and a hacker to board the vessel aka a giant laser drill thing that moves and saves the planet. Shortly after the launch, the team drills the a giant geode structure. This damages the lasers and causes the geode to crack, sending magma to fill the cavern. The crew repairs the laser, but just before they can enter the ship, a crystal shard falls on one of the member’s head, killing him. Meanwhile, on the surface, the public becomes aware of the situation after a lightning superstorm and ultra-violet radiation from the sun destroys major cities. Finally, the team reaches the core. To their surprise, the density of the core is far different than expected. Because of this, they knew their plan wouldn’t work. As a substitution, the US government deploys “DESTINI” (Deep Earth Seismic Trigger INItiative), which is the ‘secondary protocol’. Finch relays his information to Keyes, who discovers that Zimsky was one of DESTINI’s lead scientists. DESTINI, was used to try to stop earthquakes, this caused the core to stop to begin with. Keyes is convinced the result will be disastrous. They delay the deployment of DESTINI by hacking into its power system. After trying various ways to get enough energy, the team decides to leave a compartment behind, sacrificing another member. The cores natural state is restored! After the team narrowly escapes into the ocean, the crew releases the information on DESTINI to the public via the internet.

So, could our core, that spins inside of the Earth, really stop? The short answer is no, at least not for a billion years. That being said, let’s find out what would happen. According to the NASA archives, the results depend on how long the Earth’s core took to slow down. In this case, it would have been immediate. If the Earth stopped spinning suddenly, the atmosphere would still be in motion, maintaining its original rotation speed of 1100 miles per hour. Anything not attached to bedrock would be swept from the Earth. This means rocks, topsoil, trees, buildings, your pet dog, and so on, would go into the atmosphere. Life on Earth would seize to exist.

In conclusion, I think it’s safe to say the movie’s a little off. I mean, everyone would know if the core stopped spinning because they’d all be floating off into the atmosphere. To that point, there would be nothing they could do to reverse it because of how ill prepared they would have been. It’s not like they had the ship pre-made. Overall, however, I think this movie seems pretty interesting, even if it has very little factual information.