Binod Sreenivasan
IISc, Bangalore
Binod Sreenivasan earned his B.Tech. (Hons.) in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut (India), and MS from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. After a stint as a Scientist at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), he obtained a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge, specializing in fluid mechanics. Following this, he held a one-year CNRS postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratoire EPM in Grenoble, France. Binod entered the field of planetary dynamos through a postdoctoral position at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Exeter, UK. This was followed by a named Leverhulme Research Fellowship held at the School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds. Back in India, Binod served on the faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur for nearly three years before moving to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, where he is a faculty member in the Centre for Earth Sciences since 2012. Binod's research interests lie in planetary dynamics and magnetism, dynamo theory, and vortex dynamics. Binod was awarded the SwarnaJayanti Fellowship in 2011 and the Doornbos Memorial Prize in 2014. He was elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2020.
Lectures by Fellows/Associates
C Pulla Rao, IIT, Tirupati
Understanding Earth’s magnetic reversals
Earth has a large-scale axial dipole magnetic field, a fact of historical importance because of the role of the magnetic compass in the exploration of our planet. The geodynamo is driven by thermochemical convection in the planet’s fluid outer core. A long-standing question in dynamo theory is whether the preference for the axial dipole is due to a purely hydrodynamic process influenced by planetary rotation or due to a magnetohydrodynamic process influenced by both rotation and the self-generated magnetic field. Answering this question also helps us constrain the parameter space that admits polarity reversals in a strongly driven dynamo. Our recent studies have focused on the role of slow magnetostrophic waves produced from localized balances between the Lorentz, Coriolis, and buoyancy (MAC) forces in the core. While these waves support the axial dipole through generation of helicity, the attenuation of these waves under strong forcing results in polarity reversals.