260023 VO Physics of the earth (2011S)

Our Earth can be considered as a huge lab imposing extreme conditions of temperature (up to about 7000 K) and pressure (about 350 GPa in the core) to the materials in its interior. With the development of large volume multi-anvil presses in Japan and the diamond anvil cells in the United States we learned a lot about the inner workings of our Earth. In the lecture we want to review these developments and explain the main features of our Earth, like the structure and composition, pressure- temperature and density distribution as well as the most important equations of state. We also plan to discuss about the origin of the Earth magnetic field, i.e. the so called Geodynamo.