One side of Earth's interior is losing more heat

摘要

OUR planet is a bit lopsided. One half of Earth is losing heat from its interior faster than the other half, and has been for much of the past 400 million years. The uneven heat loss may be a relic of past supercontinents, when all the land masses were joined together on one side of the planet. "We see that the Pacific has lost more heat," says Krister Karlsen at the University of Oslo in Norway. Karlsen and his colleagues reconstructed the rates of heat loss from Earth's interior over the past 400 million years by combining two sources of data.