Sara and her science journey

Hi and Happy New Year to all the readers of this wonderful blog. I am Sara Gasparini, PhD student at the University of Bergen in Norway and with great enthusiasm and gratitude I recently became co-chair of the IAGA Education and Outreach committee. I am from the Italian alps, and I attained my Master’s degree in Physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. I wrote my Master’s thesis in Svalbard about the first SuperDARN (Super Dual Auroral Network) radar’s results. Living in Svalbard was a lifetime experience and a great opportunity to improve both my scientific and life skills. I received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Turin and my thesis showed different approaches for solving the Schrödinger’s equation for molecules far more complex than the hydrogen atom. I am very passionate about life and science and my curiosity has brought me to always learn about different topics. Outreach and education have always been two of my major interests besides science. What I love about outreach is the ability to amaze young minds and people not in the field. It challenges you to think about why we are doing what we do. What motivates our passion and quest for knowledge? What I love about education is that a good mentor and great teachings is all you need to feed your enthusiasm and not let it go to waste. Bright minds are motivated with new challenges and inspiring environments that great mentors know how to provide. And I would love to be that great mentor one day for young students. Passion and charisma is what warms the hearts of us human beings.

This is the SuperDARN radar in Svalbard just before it fell in 2018. This radar is part of a network of more than 30 coherent scatter radars and the radar I used for my Master Thesis to deepen the knowledge on ionospheric electrodynamics. 

My PhD research focuses on the study of the auroral oval, trying to identify the physical processes that give the auroral oval the shape it has. At high latitudes in each hemisphere there is an almost constantly present ring of aurora, known as the auroral oval. The auroral oval is sensitive to conditions in the solar wind—in particular the solar wind’s embedded “interplanetary magnetic field.” Changes in the interplanetary magnetic field have an effect on the rate of magnetic reconnection on the Earth’s dayside and ultimately leads to changes in the auroral oval morphology/topology. Understanding these changes allows for the study of the physical processes and time scales that dictate the shape and dynamics of the large-scale auroral oval. My PhD thesis seeks to understand the mechanisms which are responsible for the growth and contraction of the auroral oval, determining its shape and its changes over time.

My PhD work in the Dynamics of the Asymmetric Geospace group at the University of Bergen currently consists of working with data assimilation. In particular I work with IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global exploration) satellite images. Satellite images are a good tool to study large scale dynamics of the auroral oval because they continuously show the global response of the ionosphere to particle precipitation, usually the cause of visible aurora and they enable us to follow the shape of the aurora. Precipitating charged particles—protons and electrons with energies varying from approximately 100 eV to 20 keV—travel along the magnetic field lines from the magnetosphere into the upper-atmosphere and their collisions with the ionospheric neutrals cause auroral emissions. This not only creates beautiful patterns in the sky, which have astonished humans since we looked up the skies, but also gives us a tool for keeping track of the precipitating particles and studying their collective behavior in the
ionosphere. Satellite images are also a tool to derive ionospheric conductances which are fundamental when assimilating data using the basic ionospheric physics equations such as the ionospheric Ohm’s law. In my research I combine images from IMAGE with SuperDARN data and ground-based magnetometers data to globally quantify ionospheric convection. Ionospheric convection measurements together with the images allow me to understand the shape and the temporal evolution of the auroral oval. Moreover, they are fundamental quantities to calculate reconnection electric fields. Reconnection electric fields are the key parameters we use to understand the interaction between the Sun and the Earth’s magnetosphere. Hence, my work is devoted to interpreting reconnection electric fields and their associated uncertainties to infer new knowledge.

Here I am preparing the KHO Svalbard auroral cameras to make them ready for the auroral season. In the background is the EISCAT Svalbard incoherent scatter radar.

In my private life I do a lot of meditation. A calm mind is a temple for great ideas. I enjoy discovering new places and being in nature. When I am not hiking or in the middle of outdoor activities, I enjoy swimming at the pool as I generally enjoy water activities very much. I swim in the ocean all year round, even when the fjord temperatures are close to zero in the winter. In general, I like every kind of sport. Skiing is one of my favorite winter sports along with ice climbing, and every week I practice ballet. Determination and perseverance is what I train during my ballet classes. By doing a lot of sports I also strengthen the idea that our mind is our friend if we are healthy and in a healthy environment. As the latins used to say, “Mens sana in corpore sano”. From time to time I like to read about philosophy. Marcus Aurelius is one of my favorite philosophers. I am also passionate about learning new languages and other cultures. As I am a very curious person, I like to try new things, therefore new hobbies are always on the list!

Here I give you a quote from Marcus Aurelius. I like to remind myself of this everyday as we are here to enjoy life and be passionate about what we do. It is also a reminder to practice loving kindness towards ourselves and every being. If you would like to connect and share your experiences feel free to reach out, and if you would like to read one of my outreach articles follow the link below.

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”

https://www.sciencenorway.no/northern-lights-researchers-zone-sara-gasparini/the-beauty-of-
getting-lost-in-the-loss-cone/2090377

Pandemic PhD Stories : My french struggle

If you haven't figured it out already from the title, in this blog, I am blaming the pandemic for my lack of french, among many other things. I'll admit it's my brain's fault as well. But lets put more blame on something that can't fight back. Just can kill me or heavily damage my lungs.

Starting with a little background- my name is Shivangi, and I am from India. The first time I ever travelled abroad was for my PhD. So you can imagine my excitement to move to France and finally start my salaried life :D

I took some french classes before arriving in Nantes in November 2019. Half a day here and I realised the left hemisphere of my brain is pretty useless. But also that I needed it to work in order to survive. This meant I had to re-take language classes if I wanted to show off my french back home.

So, I started my lessons again in January and was excelling them. Nice to know my rupees earlier and euros now were not all wasted. But like always, life had other plans (Somehow, they never really match mine). Fast forward two months, and we were in lockdown. I didn't know enough french to get around and didn't have enough knowledge to do my research alone at home. And so my best friends were Netflix and literature review.

The city opened up again and so did my vigour to learn french. I enrolled for the next semester. And, drumroll...... we were back in lockdown! But this one was not that strict and we were still having online classes. But that meant there was always a google translate page open, you know, just in case. I then figured it out- my french classes were triggering the lockdowns. So I gave up.... For the greater good.

Well, it's safe to say that my french sucks. But I get by. Although it does get overwhelming sometimes to constantly hear a language and catch only bits and pieces. The only relief was when I would go to international events but that was like twice in my last year, thanks again to the great pandemic.

Here I was, hoping to meet aliens, but the only foreign bodies I met should be trapped in my mask and thrown away!

But for anyone learning french, don't let it deter you. Like I slandered stressed said, it was the pandemic's fault. As long as you regularly speak it (with and without mistakes), you'll get there. Just keep practicing with a person, and not with a wall like I did.

Image Credits: Pinterest

Comment below your pandemic story!

Do you also have your own Pandemic PhD stories? Tag our social media channels and share your stories or send it to us here and get featured in our next blog! 

 

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Shivangi Sharan is a third year PhD student at the Laboratory of Planetology and Geosciences in France. Her research focusses on the study of the magnetic field of planets and to infer their internal structure from it. She is an active member of the IAGA Blog Team and can be contacted via e-mail here.

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What a PhD on Core-Mantle Interaction looks like

I’m interested in how we can separate regions of the Earth’s main magnetic field into local regions to better understand how the mantle and core interact. It is important to remember that the main field is the most dominant contribution (>90%) to the Earth's magnetic field at the Earth's surface and changes over time due to the movement of conductive liquid in the outer core. This liquid is mostly composed of iron and is swirling in a complex current system due to the release of heat from the centre of the Earth, the turning motion of the planet, and the magnetic field perturbing the conductive liquid. Core flow and magnetic field models at the CMB tend to be described by spherical harmonics, which are not suitable for separation into individual regions due to large leakage being generated during the separation (Backus, 1968; Wieczorek and Simons, 2005). Spherical Slepian functions can spatially and spectrally separate bandlimited potential fields by transforming the spherical harmonic coefficients into the Slepian basis and sorting the functions by contribution to the patch (Simons and Plattner, 2015). 

We wished to make geophysical interpretations of the impact of the Large Low Velocity Provinces (LLVPs) on the core surface flow over time. LLVPs are two antipodal regions of anomalously low seismic velocity cover ~25% of the CMB surface (Koelemeijer, 2021). Long-lived features in the Earth’s magnetic field have been speculated to be linked to the LLVP structures as evidence for top-down control on the geodynamo (Tarduno et al., 2015). Whether these features apply a thermal forcing, a chemical exchange, dynamic topography or other effect to the core remains to be explored (McNamara, 2019; Zhao et al., 2015; Rhodri Davies et al., 2012).

The decomposition of SV at the Earth’s surface achieved from 5 biannual snapshots from May 2008 to May 2016 using 69 altitude-cognizant Slepian eigenfunctions to describe the Inside LLVPs. The blue circles in the global spherical harmonic plot show the data variability over the time period due to the satellite coverage.

In my PhD, we successfully incorporated spherical Slepian functions into regional SV inversions from satellite data for 2006–2021 and separated 150 years of COV-OBS.x2 SV model coefficients to investigate how LLVPs may be affecting core surface flow over time (Hammer et al., 2021; Huder et al, 2020). We identify that the energy within the region is incrementally changing over time. The spectral energy within the LLVPs at the Earth’s surface are changing over time and there is good correlation between periods of known acceleration change (from Mandea et al., 2010; and Duan and Huang, 2020) and inflection points in the spectra at l = 2 and l = 4 which reflect changes in signal due to antipodal structures. Inversions of satellite energy within the LLVPs have been relatively constant over the last 20 years and is roughly proportional to the surface area of the LLVPs but the longer time series shows a reduction in spectral energy within the LLVPs over time which is slowing over time. This work requires further investigations about the best applications of spherical Slepian functions, the cause of this SV change and extending the time period (e.g. using GGF100k, Panovska et al., 2019).

Hannah Rogers has just submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh and is a member of the IAGA Social Media team. Her specialism is in investigating regional magnetic fields of Earth at the surface and the core-mantle boundary using mathematical methodologies. You can follow her on Twitter at @Hannah_Rogers94.