Acquisition of a Superconducting Rock Magnetometer and a Magnetostatically Shielded Room

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9906070KodamaThis grant provides partial support for the costs of acquiring a superconducting rock magnetometer, an automatic degausser, an automatic sample handler, and a magnetostatically-shielded room for the paleomagnetics laboratory at Lehigh University. The PI, Ken Kodama, a full professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at Lehigh, and his graduate students, as well as undergraduates conducting paleomagnetic research projects, will use the equipment in their research.The new paleomagnetic equipment at Lehigh will replace an aging superconducting rock magnetometer and a malfunctioning alternating field demagnetizer. Both of these pieces of equipment are no longer supported by their manufacturers. The equipment will allow the PI and his students to continue their work on delineating the effects of burial compaction on the magnetic inclination of magnetite and hematite-bearing sedimentary rocks, the effects of tectonic strain on the accuracy of a paleomagnetic direction, and on environmental magnetic studies of recent lake sediments. The magnetostatically-shielded room will be particularly important for the continuation of the PI's most recent compaction correction work on weakly magnetized marine sedimentary rocks that suggest allochthoneity for western North American terranes. The new paleomagnetic equipment and the magnetostatically-shielded room will be complemented by existing paleomagnetic equipment at Lehigh (thermal demagnetizer, impulse magnetizer, partial anhysteretic remanent magnetization (pARM) magnetizer, and sampling drills) and a recently acquired, partially NSF-funded anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) meter.***