Dear members,

Coming Friday the 25th of November Lennart de Groot, associate professor paleomagnetism, will give a FEST talk about:

Solving big problems with tiny signals:

Unraveling the behavior of the Earth’s magnetic field using micromagnetic measurements

The Earth’s magnetic field protects our planet against potentially harmful electromagnetically charged particles from the Sun. Moreover, it is our only window into the dynamics of the deep Earth that has a memory in rocks. To reconstruct the behavior of the Earth’s magnetic field, my group studies magnetic signals stored in volcanic rocks. Due to their complex mineralogy, however, methods to obtain information on the past strength of the Earth’s magnetic field have success rates as low as 10-20%. Therefore, we develop a new method to obtain information from individual grains in a sample: Micromagnetic Tomography. This technique combines a magnetic surface scan of a sample with spatial information on the sizes, shapes, and locations of the iron-oxides obtained from a microCT scan. Then we use a mathematical inversion to obtain the magnetic information of individual grains and interpret only the signals of the most reliable ones.

The FEST will take place in KBG – Pangea at 16:00. Drinks will be provided afterwards in the grand-café of the VMA.

Hope to see many of you there!

The FEST committee