Comment on gc-2021-41

Abstract

Paleomagnetism is a relatively unknown part of Earth sciences that is not well integrated into the school curriculum in the United Kingdom. Throughout recent years, there has been a decline in the number of Earth science students in the UK. In 2018 and 2019, we developed outreach activities and resources to introduce the scientifically-engaged general public to paleomagnetism and raise awareness of how geomagnetism affects society today, thus putting paleomagnetism, and Earth sciences, in the spotlight. We tested our ideas at local events that were visited mostly by families with small children, with tens to hundreds of participants. Our project culminated in the ‘Magnetic to the Core’ stand at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in 2019, which is visited by members of the general public as well as students and teachers, scientists, policymakers and the media. At this event, we communicated the fundamentals of paleomagnetism through hands-on experiments and presented our recent research advances in a fun and family friendly way. To test the impact of our exhibit on knowledge of paleomagnetism and Earth’s magnetic field on visitors, we designed an interactive quiz and collected results from 382 participants over 8 days. The results show an increase in score of 19.1 % between those who had not yet visited the stand to those who had visited for more than 10 minutes. The results from school-age respondents alone show a larger increase in score of 28.1 % between those who had not yet visited and those who had spent more than 10 minutes at the stand. These findings demonstrate that this outreach event was successful in impacting visitors’ learning. We hope our Magnetic to the Core project can serve as an inspiration for other Earth science laboratories looking to engage a wide audience and measure the success and impact of their outreach activities.