2023 Year in Review at the Institute for Rock Magnetism

2023 at the Institute for Rock Magnetism (IRM) reminds me of a quote from Rose Kennedy, “Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments.” And there were a lot of wonderful IRM magnetic moments over the last year! Our flagship IRM-NSF Visiting Fellowship Program continues to attract a wide range of talented researchers from around the globe to conduct magnetics research here in Minnesota on exciting topics ranging from lunar magnetism to the formation of ferromanganese nodules on the seafloor to the distribution of Fe-bearing minerals exhaled from hydrothermal plumes. Visitors ranged from graduate students and postdocs to seasoned faculty, and the “magnetic interactions” between these colleagues and IRM students and staff during their typical two-week stays allows us to share scientific ideas, create new collaborations, and get to know research teams personally, thereby fostering a sense of community. This community feeling was on full display at the IRM’s 13th Conference on Rock Magnetism (June 5-8, 2023). These biennial conferences are normally held in Santa Fe, New Mexico and have provided a unique meeting style for the international geomagnetic community, where almost as much time is dedicated to discussion as to giving scientific talks. For the first time, the “Santa Fe Meeting” was held here on the University of Minnesota campus, giving us an opportunity to show off the lab’s instrumentation as well as the beautiful setting of our department in Tate Hall. The meeting attracted over 60 in-person participants and roughly an equal number of online participants, where approximately a third of the attendees were junior researchers (graduate students and postdocs). Moreover, an entire day of the conference was dedicated to assessing our community’s ongoing challenges associated with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, with the practical goal of identifying cross-institutional strategies for improving diversity within our discipline. Despite a collective longing for southwestern scenery, seeing our community come together in such a productive way left all of us inspired to lean further into our own geomagnetic research.

Our team continues to thrive in all kinds of exciting ways. IRM postdoctoral scholar Plinio Jaqueto was awarded the 2022 Early Career Award from the Karst Division of the Geological Society of America for his research on the environmental and geomagnetic records preserved in speleothems. Postdoctoral scholar Jonathan Stine continues to make progress studying environmental and magnetostratigraphic change across the Carboniferous-Permian boundary in Utah. IRM PhD student Rashida Doctor was awarded an Outstanding Student Presentation Award for her talk on the acquisition of magnetization in speleothems at the 2022 American Geophysical Union Meeting in Chicago. IRM PhD student John McDaris was selected as a Grant A. Harris Fellow METER Group for his dissertation work on the geophysics of groundwater monitoring. Declan Ramirez continues to study the magnetism of archaeological materials from Minnesota for his Masters project. IRM undergraduate researcher Emma Kostecki has made impressive progress studying the viscosity of natural magnetizations and will be joining us for field work in Brazil in the late summer. Fellow IRM undergraduate Kacie Malone was the recipient of a UMN Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program award to study phase transitions in Fe-bearing clays this fall. Recent IRM undergraduate Josie Welsh started graduate school at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Meanwhile, Max Brown continues to provide as a steady hand as IRM Facility Manager, Peat Solheid remains our linchpin in maintaining the vast array of the IRM’s geophysical instruments, and Dario Bilardello plays an essential role mentoring our visitors, authoring and editing the IRM Quarterly, and maintaining the IRM website. All this activity over last year leaves us looking eagerly ahead to see what the next year will bring!