Vote! Vote! Vote!

UNESCO organised a film festival in collaboration with various geoscience partners to promote and showcase sustainable future. It is an international film and video festival that hopes to inspire and educate others about the Earth and its past as well as future. The Earth's Future Festival accepted movies from anywhere between 3 to 90 minutes. 

IAGA member Katia Pinheiro, along with other colleagues submitted the movie 'Magnetic Mosaic'. The movie talks about the geomagnetic field with an all women cast from GFZ Germany. The cast are all scientists from 10 different countries who work in geoscience. Click the link to watch the movie on YouTube and take a journey into the magnetic fields of Earth starting from the core and reaching beyond the atmosphere.

'Magnetic Mosaic' made it to the top 20 finalists out of 972 submissions in the festival and to the top 3 in the category "Woman in Geoscience".

Congratulations to the cast and everyone involved in the making behind the scenes! We now eagerly await the jury's decision, on October 15, 2022 at the Awards Ceremony in Sydney, Australia. In the meantime, you can show your support by voting for the movie for the 'People's Choice Awards'. Vote on the link below. All you need to provide is an email address.

https://www.earthfuturesfestival.com/peoples-choice

 

Cast-

Sanja Panovska 

Kuan Yu 

Monika Korte 

Tatiana Savranskaia  

Poulami Roy 

Elodie Kendall 

Katia Jasbinschek Pinheiro 

Sahar Sobhkhizmiandehi  

Julia Himmelsbach  

Marina Garcia Penaranda

 

Please feel free to share the link with your colleagues/groups or on social media.

Europlanet Public Engagement Funding Program 2022

The Europlanet Society has set up a funding scheme for funding outreach projects. The prize, awarded annually, varies from 1000 to 5000 euros depending on the project selected. The aim is to widen the reach of the scientific community. It is awarded to individuals or groups that come up with innovative ideas along with a social impact.

This year's award has been awarded to Katia Pinheiro and her team for the creative project 'Bimbim's Team: A Journey to the Planets'. Katia is an active member of our IAGA social media, responsible for video creation and production. She is also the co-chair of the Geomagnetic Observation Working Group. Along with two more members of the IAGA social media and her other colleagues, she plans to introduce little kids to the interesting world of planets and the solar system. 

 

Congratulations to the team! 'Bimbim's Team' will do sets of stories about planetary science through the use of puppets. This will make education fun as well as knowledgeable. To get a sneak peak of the puppets, watch this video.

To get all updates about the project and the final movies, stay tuned on IAGA social media channels!

On This Day #1

If we look back on this day in history, it marks the birth anniversary of Hans Christian Ørsted. He was a Danish physicist and chemist born on 14th August 1977 who formed the foundation of electromagnetism.

A portrait of Hans Christian Ørsted by Christian Albrecht Jensen (1842). Source: Wikipedia

The presence of an electric current deflects a compass needle was the starting point of this discovery. Now, we apply it to objects as big and far away as the planets and space. Much of what the IAGA community does is based on the interaction of electric and magnetic fields.

In his honour, Ørsted (Oe) is the unit of magnetic field strength in the CGS (centimeter-gram-second) system of units. The first Danish satellite was also named after him. The Ørsted satellite launched in 1999 provided magnetic field data around Earth. Many geomagnetic field models make use of this data even today.

6th IAGA Summer School

The 6th IAGA Summer School will be conducted from 6th to 11th July 2023 in Niemegk Observatory, Germany. As always, it is conducted in the week before the General Assembly. The IUGG Assembly will take place in Berlin, Germany from 11th to 20th July 2023.

IAGA will sponsor around 20 early career researchers (ECRs) to attend and stay at the summer school. The school provides a chance to interact with fellow ECRs in the community and gives an understanding about a wide range of topics relating to magnetism and aeronomy.

Images from the IAGA 2017 summer school hosted by SANSA Space Science, Hermanus in South Africa.

The last date to apply is 30th September. ECRs need to fill the application form and submit it to the head of the IAGA Division they belong to. To know more about the application process, click here.

To know more about IAGA and its Summer Schools, look for our blog series 'All things IAGA' in the right hand panel, or click here.

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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How To... Help with Outreach

In our new series of blogs we want to shine a light on some of the basics that researchers undertake in their day-to-day lives and provide guidance for early-career researchers. There are some tasks that a researcher will never have any official training in but are expected to do as part of their jobs. We hope these blogs make it easier. The first blog in this "How To..." series focuses on outreach. 

Science is fun and interesting! That’s why researchers choose to do the job that they do! But a large part of a researcher's job is communicating new results to the wider scientific and public community – sometimes referred to as ‘outreach’. So here’s a quick ‘How To…’ guide to provide some insight into everything outreach.

What is outreach?

The process of communicating science to others. It usually refers to educating the public in science and other topics they might not encounter in day to day life.

Why do outreach?

It is rewarding and can be a lot of fun. The general public funds a lot of research through taxes and it is a great way to demonstrate why science is important. Also, it is a great way to show your results to others and may allow you to appear on TV or help with a film related to your research (e.g. Jurassic Park!).

How do you do outreach?

Outreach can happen on all scales; it can be as simple as talking to an individual or running an international science festival! However, regardless of the size of the project there are some things you should always remember:

1.    Be age and material appropriate – a 4-year old child will not have the same understanding of the world as their parent. Therefore, we have to tailor the words and activities we use for the situation.

2.    Be engaging – asking people questions or having an activity for participants can help keep the audiences’ attention.

3.    Be organised – it is important to have everything set up and ready to go ahead of time. Think about what materials you will need and how the event will run.

4.    Be ready for questions – people love asking questions back! Make sure you know a bit more than just about the field you work in.

Want to know more?

The best way to become more involved with outreach is to join an existing project in your nearby community. There’s lots of materials out there if you search the internet. There’s also events run through international organisations (e.g. AGU, RAS, EGU etc) which you can join. Take a look at the websites below to be inspired:

https://www.skypeascientist.com/

https://www.societyforscience.org/outreach-and-equity/

http://www.uscscienceoutreach.org/

https://nationalmaglab.org/education/teachers/classroom-outreach-2

https://pintofscience.com/

 

Image Credits: Created using fotor.com

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.

PhD in IAGA #5

IAGA has a lot of different scientists working on various topics. In this series of blogs, we will introduce some topics that are being worked on by PhD students. Hopefully this will give a better picture of the work being done in the field and encourage more early career researchers.

Sarasija Sanaka, is a PhD student working at the Institute of Geophysics Polish Academy of Science, Poland. Her supervisor is Dr. hab. Anne Neska. Sarasija says:

My research is about source effects in Magnetotellurics. Source effects are the inappropriate source signals which lead to distortion in the results, which further leads to misinterpretation of the subsurface electrical structure. My task is to identify and understand the origin of such problematic signals. Such signals are dominant in the high to mid-latitude regions. To recognize source effects, we have considered long-term magnetotelluric data, because they reveal temporal changes which cannot be explained by subsurface conductivity changes.

The above figures represent time-dependent transfer functions at 4000s for Grabnik (GRB) and Suwałki (SUV) stations in Poland.