The Swarm mission and recent changes in the Earth’s magnetic field

The Swarm mission is exploring the Earth’s magnetic field. No space explorations of the Earth’s magnetic field has done this in detail so far.

The webinar will discuss this interesting mission and shed light on current changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, including the rapid movement of the North Magnetic Pole and the increase in field strength in the South Atlantic anomaly.

Chris Swlay from DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark will introduce us to the Swarm mission.

(Image: ESA–P. Carril, 2013)

What will the lecture be about:

The Swarm trio of satellites is presently carrying out the most detailed ever survey of the Earth’s magnetic field for low-Earth-orbit. In this talk I will give an overview of the Swarm mission, describe how the collected data is used to build global models of the geomagnetic field, and present results concerning recent changes in the field. These include the recent rapid motion of the northern magnetic pole and the growth of a weak magnetic field region in the South Atlantic. Implications for the poorly understood dynamics of Earth’s core will be discussed.

Chris Finlay

About the speaker:

Chris Finlay is a Professor of Geomagnetism at DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark. His work focuses on changes in the Earth’s magnetic field on time scales from minutes to millennia, exploring both observational and theoretical aspects. He has a Master’s degree in Physics from the University of Oxford, UK, and a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Leeds, UK. He worked for 5 years as a post-doctoral researcher and then as an oberassistant at ETH Zurich before joining the Danish Technical University in 2011. In 2010 he was the lead author of the International Geomagnetic Reference Field and he was chair of the IAGA Working Group V-MOD from 2011 to 2015. In 2012 he was awarded the SEDI Doornbos Memorial Prize for outstanding work on the Earth’s deep interior by a young scientist. He works extensively with geomagnetic observations from satellites and ground observatories using these to probe the structure and dynamics of the Earth.