By Diana Steele
Were the Earth a crystal ball, you might gaze 2,900 kilometers down to its outer core with a telescope. The Earth, though, is frustratingly opaque — to light. Most knowledge of the planet’s internal structure comes from studying seismic waves, which give a kind of ultrasound image. Inferences about Earth’s internal chemistry rely on the elements found in near-surface rocks, meteorites and the sun.
Recently, geoscientists have developed a new tool for probing the Earth’s innards. Borrowing a page from astrophysics, they are using the curious subatomic particles known as neutrinos. Astrophysicists have used neutrino telescopes for decades to study neutrinos originating in the sun and elsewhere in the cosmos. Now earth scientists are taking a neutrino telescope and looking down, to illuminate the Earth’s interior by detecting “geoneutrinos” — neutrinos produced within the planet itself.
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“Now, for the first time, we have the possibility of measuring the composition of the Earth in real time,” says William McDonough, a geochemist at the University of Maryland in College Park.