Craig Martin
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Earth & Environmental Science
Magnetic storms from space can damage power grids and communication systems. Regions where Earth's magnetic field is weak are more exposed, and some continent-sized weak regions have grown over the past century.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
paleomagnetism
geomagnetic field
geomagnetism
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Characterize the magnetic minerals in modern coral skeletons from living reefs, using rock-magnetic analyses and microscopy.
- Determine how stable the remanent magnetization in modern corals is and where it comes from, and test how reliably it matches the ambient geomagnetic field during growth, using paleomagnetic measurements.
- Evaluate whether coral paleomagnetic records can be extended into fossil corals to produce yearly time series of Earth's magnetic field spanning tens of thousands of years.
More about the research
Predicting how this risk will change requires knowing how the field behaved in the past. Most existing records of the ancient magnetic field, however, are too coarse in time to show changes on human-relevant timescales.
Why it matters
Geomagnetic storms threaten electrical grids, communications and public health, and the United States faces potentially trillions of dollars in damage from a severe storm. Yearly records of the past magnetic field preserved in corals could improve forecasts of how weak-field regions evolve. That could help utilities and planners prepare.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Aleksey Smirnov
Michigan Technological University, MI·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure ancient magnetic field strength in Miocene Vestfirðir lava flows using the IZZI Thellier-Thellier and LTD-DHT-Shaw paleointensity methods, backed by rock magnetic analyses, to fill gaps in the global database.
Grant Stephens
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Physics
Release the first combined storm-substorm empirical model of Earth's magnetospheric magnetic field, together with its machine learning data mining algorithms, as open-source software in modern programming languages.
Shinichi Ohtani
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify the internal and external conditions under which the dawnside wedge current system appears during geomagnetic storms, using SuperMAG-selected events and probability distributions of solar wind and magnetospheric parameters.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
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