The Earth’s Core: The Engine of Our Planet

Three thousand kilometers beneath our feet lies a ball of churning liquid metal as thin as water and as hot as the sun’s surface: Earth’s outer core. The center of the ball, the inner core, is solid and about two-thirds the size of the moon. The inner core is constantly growing as the planet cools. Convective motions in the outer core generate Earth’s magnetic field, shielding the atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind. Heat rising from the core also drives plate tectonics, reshaping Earth’s surface.

The history of our planet is determined by the fundamental properties of the core, such as its temperature, composition, thermal and electrical conductivity and others. In this Presidential Lecture, physicist Dario Alfè will describe how we can now calculate these properties using computational tools based on quantum mechanics and statistical physics.

Alfè is a condensed matter physicist who develops and applies first-principle computational tools to study high-pressure and high-temperature properties of materials, mainly in the context of planetary interiors. Born and raised in Napoli, Italy, he received his Ph.D. from SISSA in Trieste, Italy. After post-doctoral stints at Keele University in England and University College London, in 2006, he joined the faculty of University College London. Since 2018, he has also been a faculty member of the Università di Napoli Federico II in Italy.