Project description
Protecting Earth by deciphering magnetic past and future
Earth’s magnetic field, crucial for shielding against cosmic radiation, is rapidly weakening, endangering our planet’s habitability. While recent satellite data and simulations advanced our understanding of short-term core processes, long-term dynamics remain elusive due to sparse historical records. The decay in Earth’s dipole field strength over the past century hints at underlying core instabilities yet to be understood. In this context, the ERC-funded PALEOCORE project aims to provide the first comprehensive observational constraints on Earth’s core dynamics over multi-centennial to millennial timescales, crucial for forecasting future field changes and understanding the causes behind the recent decay. Specifically, it will integrate cutting-edge paleomagnetic observations with innovative modelling techniques.
Objective
PALEOCORE will provide the first comprehensive observational constraints on the dynamics of Earth’s core on multi-centennial to millennial timescales. Such constraints are essential to understand the core processes responsible for the rapid decay of Earth’s dipole field strength over the past century and to forecast future field changes.
Generated through convective motions in the liquid iron core, Earth’s magnetic field acts as a shield against harmful cosmic radiation and plays a crucial role for the habitability of our planet. The past two decades of satellite monitoring of the magnetic field, in combination with major advancements in numerical simulations of the geodynamo, have generated a wealth of knowledge on relatively rapid processes in the core. However, due to the lack of reference data with adequate resolution, the dynamics of the core on timescales longer than the convective overturn time (~130 years) are still poorly understood. Observational constraints of core dynamics on these timescales are crucial to evaluate proposed driving mechanisms of the geodynamo.
Through recent technical innovations, models based on indirect paleomagnetic observations of Earth’s magnetic field are providing information on past field changes with unprecedented resolution. These models suggest that the recent dipole decay is part of a millennial-scale recurrent pattern associated with weak field anomalies, like the present-day South Atlantic Anomaly. The aim of PALEOCORE is to construct the first ever integrated core-field core-flow model over millennial timescales to study such ancient analogues and reveal the underlying core dynamics responsible for driving these changes. This will be achieved through a combination of (i) strategic paleomagnetic data acquisition and key modelling innovations (solving bottlenecks in the current approach), (ii) incorporation of independent radionuclide data and (iii) adaptation of data assimilation algorithms for paleomagnetic data.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringsatellite technology
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyplanetary sciencesplanets
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
22100 Lund
Sweden