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The magnetic field of the Earth gives important insight into the formation of the Earth such as the evolution of the core, the question of how the Earth solidified and how it became a hospitable planet. Ultimately, even the evolution of life on Earth and/or other planets is critically dependent on the existence of a geomagnetic field which protects microorganisms from potentially deadly cosmic rays and possibly even the atmosphere from being blown away by the solar wind – a fate that occurred to Mars billions of years ago.

Currently, little is known about these questions – the only information we have comes from highly advanced novel palaeomagnetic methods which are subject to a heated debate: The first billion years of the Earth, the time when life first appeared, could only be studied through “single-silicate-crystal” works, but these have been called into doubt by some researchers, however.  My previous work assessed how reliable the most ideal of such “single-silicate-crystals”, which contain microscopic magnetic inclusions, preserve ancient magnetic fields. Often, however, magnetic structures in these crystals are complex and my present work focusses on how we can obtain insights into the earliest geomagnetic field from ‘less-than-ideal’ silicate crystals from a theoretical perspective.