When the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) was established in 1902 with a large bequest from Andrew Carnegie, one of its goals was to encourage research in the “borderlands” between the scientific disciplines. In its first years, the CIW established two departments that became stages for research in the geosciences: the Geophysical Laboratory and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM). While the Geophysical Laboratory moved quickly in the direction of geochemical investigation and toward developing laboratory techniques to study how rocks behave at great depth within the Earth, the DTM focused on a series of problems related to geomagnetism and geo‐electricity during its first several decades. The DTM branched out starting in the 1920s to investigate the atomic nucleus, cosmic rays, and even cosmology. These two departments have now existed for over a century and today are located on a single campus where their researchers can more easily interact (Trefil and Hazen, 2002)....
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Bibliography
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Good, G.A. (2007). Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. In: Gubbins, D., Herrero-Bervera, E. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4423-6_23
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