On 18 October 2023, Prof. Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier visited the Gauss House on the grounds of Wiechert’s Göttingen Earthquake Observatory and brought with him the last still functioning Gough-Reitzel-Küppers Magnetometer (GRKM) (see photo). This portable 3-component torsion magnetometer was developed by Gough and Reitzel in 1967 and modified by Küppers at the University of Münster in the 1970s.
From 1974 onwards, 42 devices were spatially distributed in Scandinavia. They formed the basis of the European ground measurements within the global project IMS (International Magnetospheric Study, 1976 – 1979) to investigate the regional structures of magnetic field fluctuations caused, for example, by geomagnetic storms. Beautiful northern lights are often an accompanying phenomenon.

Within the framework of the Göttingen Magnetic Society, founded in 1836 by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber with the support of Alexander von Humboldt, the temporal and spatial changes of the Earth’s magnetic field were already measured in the Gauss House and at up to 50 observatories with the help of torsion magnetometers. The association “Wiechert’sche Erdbebenwarte Göttingen e.V.” will try to link the GRKM in the Gauss House with a modern camera system in order to continuously measure the variations of the earth’s magnetic field at this historical site. We thank Prof. Glaßmeier for this extraordinary enrichment of the Gauss House.

Prof. Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier was head of the Institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics at TU Braunschweig from 1991 to 2020. He has been a member of the Leopoldina since 2001. He was awarded the Julius Bartels Medal in 2010 for his work on solar-terrestrial relations.