Geophysical Institute research on display at European science meeting

University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute scientists are making presentations this week at the European Geosciences Union annual meeting in Vienna, Austria.

Work authored or co-authored by UAF researchers is being featured in poster sessions, oral presentations and hybrid remote/in-person sessions. Research topics include Fairbanks’ winter air quality, the Pacific Ocean oscillation, Earth’s magnetosphere, the origin of Earth’s magnetic field and volcano behavior.

The annual meeting is the European counterpart to the American Geophysical Union meeting and attracts about 15,000 people.

Xi Lu, a fourth-year Ph.D. physics student and research assistant, was invited to participate by a European session convener she met at last year’s AGU meeting in Chicago.
Lu will discuss her research into how hot flow anomalies form and how they affect Earth’s bow shock and magnetosheath.

Space physicist Dogacan Ozturk is presenting a poster displaying new findings about how Earth’s magnetic field lines map to locations in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Scientists take measurements from both hemispheres to understand what Earth’s protective magnetosphere looks like.

Ozturk will also make an oral presentation about a method to understand the characteristics of different auroral forms observed in all-sky imagers. That research includes work by Don Hampton and Matthew Blandin and former GI researcher Hyunju Connor.

Fairbanks’ wintertime air quality is the subject of several presentations that stem from the Alaskan Layered Pollution and Chemical Analysis project, or ALPACA. As part of that project nearly 50 scientists from the U.S. and Europe came to Fairbanks for a seven-week study of the chemical interactions that lead to poor wintertime air quality. UAF researchers William Simpson, Meeta Cesler-Maloney and Jingqiu Mao joined scientists from other institutions in presenting their work on ALPACA.

Associate research professor Gunther Kletetschka will present a new hypothesis about how Earth’s magnetic field operates. Kletetschka also has research included in a poster being presented by a Charles University colleague. Kletetschka has an affiliation with the university, which is in the Czech Republic. The research is a paleomagnetic study on Holocene sediments from a lake in the Tatra Mountains on the Poland-Slovakia border.