Geologically produced antineutrinos provide a new window into the Earth's interior

In Jules Verne's nineteenth century classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an Edinburgh professor and colleagues follow an explorer's trail down an extinct volcano to the Earth's core. Ah, fantasy! Here's reality: For more than a century after Verne wrote his novel, geophysicists have had only one tool with which to peer into our planet's heart—seismology, or analysis of vibrations produced by earthquakes and sensed by thousands of instrument stations worldwide. But now, geophysicists have a new tool for studying the Earth's interior, reported in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature