Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

K.P. Kodama is a geophysicist who studies paleomagnetism, the fossil magnetism in rocks and sediments. He has established a paleomagnetism laboratory at Lehigh that includes a magnetically-shielded room and a superconducting magnetometer. Kodama's work has looked specifically at the accuracy of the paleomagnetism in ancient rocks. Since the paleomagnetism of rocks is used to determine the ancient latitude of a continent, an accurate paleomagnetic measurement means that you can reconstruct the ancient positions of the continents correctly. One of the ways that Kodama does this is by redeposited and compacting analogues of ancient sediments in his laboratory. Kodama and his students have also travelled to Baja, China, British Columbia, California, and Newfoundland to collect samples of ancient rocks for this type of work.

Kodama and his students also study environmental magnetism. This is a rapidly expanding field in which the magnetic minerals in sediments are used to track past climatic and environmental changes in a lake catchment area or globally. They have also used magnetic records of astronomically-forced climate signals in ancient sedimentary rocks to correlate and time the depositional rate of these rocks.