Perspective

Abstract

The genius of people like Norman, Gilbert, Faraday, Oersted, Ampere and Maxwell gave geomagnetism a strong footing to tackle fundamental problems related to Earth and interplanetary space. These discoveries whetted the curiosity of the inquisitive mind to unravel the causative agents and look for interrelationships between the Earth, the Sun and other planets or satellites and use this knowledge to predictive purposes. Intricacies of changes in the geomagnetic field are studied because they change over several timescales from few million years to fraction of a second in several spectral bands. Each band of frequencies is a goldmine of information indicative of various causative mechanisms with sources in the Earth’s interior, near space or far space environment as outlined in Chapters 1 to 8. Specifically, Chapters 5 to 8 list out applications of geomagnetic measurements to understand the chemical, physical and dynamical characteristics of the atmosphere and the interior of the planet Earth. In virtually every case presented in this book, there is considerable scope for further development in exploratory techniques, analysis, interpretation and application. Prospects for the future, lie in further extension and refinement of established approaches used in magnetic observatory, upper atmospheric and solid Earth studies.