Earth’s figure and gravitation - Earth Dynamics: Deformations and Oscillations of the Rotating Earth - page 385

The profiles of the density, reciprocal of the flattening, radial derivative of the
flattening, di erence in the axial and equatorial moments of inertia, and enclosed

mass are shown in Table 5.4 for Earth model Cal8, as computed by the programme
TORQUE.
The mass, M I , the inner core would have if its density had the uniform value ρ i ,
equal to that at the bottom of the outer core, is found to be

ff

4

M i =

3 π r 0 ρ i =

10 22 kg,

×

9.17 (5.267)

cm 3 . corresponding to density ρ i = 12.17 g /

The coe cient of the gravity restoring torque is found to have a very large value

10 24 Nm. The large value of the restoring torque led to an investiga-
tion of the possible precessional modes of the solid inner core (Smylie et al. , 1984).
Of particular interest was the possible relation of the observed motion of the dipole
axis of the geomagnetic field to precession of the inner core (Szeto and Smylie,
1984a,b).

of Γ= 2.40 ×