Rewatched The Core and finally clocked why the seismic waves bugged me so much after 12 years on the job

Cameron Walker · 2026-09-22T20:15:05.203302+00:00

I was off shift last Tuesday and threw on The Core for background noise, and about 40 minutes in I hit pause because something had been nagging me since I first saw it in a theater back in 2003. The whole plot hinges on the earth's outer core freezing solid, which would mean it was cooling down, but the movie shows the planet's magnetic field getting weaker at the same time, and that's backwards from how any of this works. The outer core is already liquid metal, and it stays liquid because of leftover heat and pressure, so if it were actually solidifying you'd get less convection current in the core, not more, and the field would fade over millions of years, not weeks. I get that you need stakes for a disaster movie and I still had a good time watching it, but once you know how the geodynamo actually runs it's hard to unsee. Does bad core physics like this bug anyone else, or is it just me being a nerd about it?

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Rewatched The Core and finally clocked why the seismic waves bugged me so much after 12 years on the job | Bad Movie Science - Discusd