The Core

Hilary Swank as Major Rebecca Childs / Beck ...USAF, an astronaut who distinguished herself during an emergency crash landing of the Space Shuttle Endeavour in Los Angeles, California.

The Core

Cast: Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Bruce Greenwood, Delroy Lindo, DJ Qualls, Stanley Tucci

Geophysicist Dr. Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) discovers that an unknown force has caused the earth's inner core to stop rotating. With the planet's magnetic field rapidly deteriorating, our atmosphere literally starts to come apart at the seams with catastrophic consequences. To resolve the crisis, Keyes, along with a team of the world's most gifted scientists, travel into the earth's core in a subterranean craft piloted by "terranauts," Major Rebecca "Beck" Childs (Hilary Swank) and Colonel Robert Iverson (Bruce Greenwood). Their mission: detonate a device that will reactivate the core.

Earth's inner core

The Earth's inner core is the Earth's innermost part and according to seismological studies, it is a primarily solid ball with a radius of about 1220 kilometers, or 760 miles. It is believed to consist primarily of an iron–nickel alloy and to be approximately the same temperature as the surface of the Sun: approximately 5700 K (5400 °C). Based on the relative prevalence of various chemical elements in our solar system, the theory of planetary formation, and constraints imposed or implied by the chemistry of the rest of the Earth's volume, the inner core is believed to consist primarily of a nickel-iron alloy known as NiFe: 'Ni' for nickel, and 'Fe' for ferrum or iron. The fact that precious metals and other heavy elements are so much more abundant in the Earth's inner core than in its crust is explained by the theory of the so-called iron catastrophe, an event that occurred before the first eon during the accretion phase of the early Earth.
Because the inner core is not rigidly connected to the Earth's solid mantle, the possibility that it rotates slightly faster or slower than the rest of Earth has long been entertained. In the 1990s, seismologists made various claims about detecting this kind of super-rotation by observing changes in the characteristics of seismic waves passing through the inner core over several decades, using the aforementioned property that it transmits waves faster in some directions. Estimates of this super-rotation are around one degree of extra rotation per year....


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