Facility Support: Institute for Rock Magnetism

This Division of Earth Science Instrumentation and Facilities Program award will continue operational support for the Institute for Rock Magnetism (IRM) at the University of Minnesota for the next five years. The IRM is a multi-user facility for pure and applied research on the magnetic properties of rocks, sediments, and minerals. IRMS provides instrumental infrastructure, technical expertise, and educational outreach for the Earth Science community and related disciplines for research in Earth, planetary and environmental sciences. The IRM serves as a national facility for research into the physics and chemistry of magnetization in natural materials resulting from geologic, biologic, and anthropogenic processes in the Earth system and covering time scales from the present and recent past to billions of years ago. Natural-material magnetic research is an essential part of larger scientific efforts to understand the origin and evolution of the geomagnetic field and the deep interior of Earth and terrestrial planets; the history of tectonic plates; and the evolution of Earth's surficial environments and climate. The five-year project will continue to strengthen opportunities for community-based research and promote the progress of science by: (1) maintaining the integrity, function, and accuracy of the facility instrumentation and computer resources, which maintains the IRM database; (2) providing access and support to over 150 visiting scientists from the US and abroad projected to use IRM facilities during the award period; (3) training and education of undergraduate, graduate students, and early career scientists; and (4) providing research-related information to the Earth science community and related disciplines through biennial conferences, website, online database, and a quarterly newsletter. The well-established biennial rock magnetism summer school provides a ten-day workshop for hands-on, lab-based, training for graduate and early career scientists.

The magnetic behavior of particle assemblages of iron oxides, hydroxides, sulfides and iron alloys is governed by a combination of physical and chemical processes at the nanometric to micrometric levels which makes magnetic measurements sensitive indicators of mineral composition, crystallography, microstructures, and particle size, shape and orientation distributions. The magnetization that emerges from these processes and properties is affected by time, temperature, pressure, external magnetic fields, and (bio)geochemical surroundings. Understanding how these processes operate is the foundation for determining magnetic mineral compositions, concentrations and size distributions in natural samples, and for understanding the origin and significance of natural remanent records of ancient magnetic fields on Earth and other planetary bodies. A suite of advanced instruments enables sensitive measurements of magnetization under controlled conditions of temperature, magnetic fields, time, and orientation, and allow detailed characterization of magnetic mineralogy in geological, extraterrestrial, biological, and anthropogenic materials. Research facilitated by the analytical and technical capabilities of the IRM improves our understanding of how the complex natural recording systems work, and to maximize the information that we can recover from magnetic analysis of natural materials. Research activities are carried out by IRM scientists and students and visiting researchers, and encompass a range of aspects, from basic understanding of rock and mineral magnetism, to applied studies in which magnetic characteristics of rocks and sediments are used as tools for investigating a wide variety of geological and surficial Earth processes. The scale of investigations extends from bacterial magnetic particles and environmental reconstructions to plate tectonic reconstructions and magnetic mapping of other planets.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.