Accessing the rapidly rotation regime of convection and magnetic field generation in planetary interiors

This project involves the investigation of the mechanisms that lead to reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field. As shown in the figure below, the polarity of the Earth’s field reverses rarely, making modelling difficult. In this project we use the latest advances in “rare event” modelling to construct descriptions of the processes that lead to these rare events. We shall use both simplified models and computational models of magnetic field generation in rapidly rotating spherical shells; the latter will be run on high performance parallel machines.