Pop-artist Andy Warhol famously stated that: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. I suspect that yesterday may be the closest we will ever get to proving him right.
A paper 
on which I am lead-author claims that we have may have pinned down the point in Earth’s history when the inner core first started to freeze at the centre of the Earth to between 1 and 1.5 billion years ago. I already thought this was big news so was a bit deflated when Nature decided not to run with the excellent picture (left) created by Kay Lancaster (cartographer at the University of Liverpool) on its cover.
Nevertheless, our excellent press officer at Liverpool helped produce a great press release which saw a story featured on the popular Phys.org website from the outset and an article in one of Spain’s top newspapers El Pais.
Things were a bit slow-burning for a while – except in India and Finland – before a piece by Simon Redfern appeared on BBC news online. This was quickly followed up by a piece on the Daily Mail which our press officer tells me is the “most read online news site in the world”. A number of other things have followed including a post on one of my favourite blogs – IFLScience.
Then, just as I was packing up to go home, I received a phone call from the BBC World Service who wanted a short interview. I obliged in the evening and my nervous responses aired a few hours later. You can listen to the podcast here (it is the very last feature – “And finally…”). They refer before and after the interview to the finding as being that the magnetic field is much older than previously thought – incorrect in this specific case but relevant to another recent finding, albeit one that Liverpool people were not involved in making.
More informative is a piece I wrote for “The Conversation”.
A summary from our press office indicates that there are 39 news outlets and counting featuring the story and tweets still coming through every few minutes. The coverage extends over at least 11 countries ranging from USA to China, Argentina to Pakistan so, while I can, I am claiming (brief) world fame for our research…
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