You may have heard some news story(ies) going around about how the Earth’s core/center has stopped spinning or rotating. As always, the COM has it all wrong since they’re not very savvy on Science; we can thank the greedy hedge fund owners gutting the newsroom of talent and expertise.
Thankfully, the great Dr. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame has come to the rescue to elaborate on how COM has no brains. Besides, I know one basic fact about the Earth via Astronomy which dovetails into why colonizing and/or terraforming Mars is a wasted of time; if the core stopped spinning we wouldn’t know nor live to tell about it. The iron in the center generates our magnetic field. The field protects the Earth (and all aboard) from most of the Sun’s lethal radiation (the ozone is a big factor as well) and it keeps the atmosphere in place, otherwise it would be ripped away into space quickly. Setting up Earth-like atmosphere “machines” as per Hadley’s Hope from the movie Aliens would be a complete waste on Mars until the red planet has a field strong enough to buffer the constant solar winds.
I did catch a piece on NPR about the same thing. The geologist they spoke to said it’s not uncommon for the various layers and the core to change up their speed but nothing is stopping. The guest mentioned a camp who believes the core is stationary yet they’re in the minority. I don’t think we’ll ever truly know. You can’t get far under the Earth’s crust due to all the lava. If you could get past the lava, I’m pretty confident there’s something even hotter beneath. Our world is similar to the Sun, the closer you work your way to the center, the hotter and stronger the pressure.