Fingerprinting the Young Earth by Dennis Walikainen Smirnov
garners NSF CAREER Award Aleksey Smirnov has been honored with a
prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career
Development Award, commonly known as a CAREER Award. The five-
year, $470,000 grant will underwrite his research on the ancient
history of the Earth’s magnetic field and how it may have
affected the planet’s geology and even the evolution of living
things. The Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the planet’s
metallic inner core and has two poles that correspond roughly
with the North and South Poles. The field protects the Earth and
its inhabitants from solar radiation and high-speed particles
from deep space, but it is highly dynamic. Its strength can vary
dramatically, and every few hundred thousand years, it reverses.
If that were to happen, all our compasses would point south.
These changes leave indelible fingerprints in cooling lava,
called fossil magnetism. Smirnov, an associate professor of
geophysics, tracks down th