SPEAKER_01: The storied legacy of Mercedes-Benz is rooted in empowered women who've gone on to show the world what they can accomplish. This July, Wamanica has teamed up with Mercedes-Benz to feature women who've charted their own paths and achieved greatness. Join us on this journey as we celebrate women who were driven to pursue their passions, even if it meant changing course along the way. This month on Wamanica, we're talking about dynamos. Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Wamanica. This month, we're highlighting women who flood dynamic lives. Lives that have shifted, evolved, and bloomed, often later in life. Today we're talking about a woman who discovered the composition of the Earth's inner core. She worked for years as an assistant in administrative roles, but she never stopped pursuing her own research, which would eventually upend the way scientists thought of the center of the planet. And she figured it all out thanks to some ingenuity and earthquakes. Please welcome Inga Lehmann. Inga was born on May 13, 1888, near Copenhagen, Denmark. Her family raised her untraditionally, in a progressive household. As a young girl, Inga attended a coeducational private school, which was unusual for that time. The school treated boys and girls on an equal plane intellectually. This instilled in her an early notion of gender equality. Inga later reflected that this experience brought some disappointment later in life when I had to recognize that this was not the general attitude. Inga went on to pursue higher education at the University of Copenhagen. There, she studied mathematics while also taking classes in astronomy, chemistry, and physics. She spent several years there before continuing her education at Newnham College, one of the women's colleges at the University of Cambridge. Inga enjoyed her time in England, but the differences in the way girls and women were treated came as a surprise to her. Women were allowed to take courses and attend lectures, but they weren't actually granted Inga had university degrees until several decades later. Even so, Inga overworked herself to the point of extreme exhaustion and had to return home to Denmark after just about a year. Back in Copenhagen, she spent several years working in an actuary's office. Eventually, she resumed her degree in mathematics at the University of Copenhagen and graduated in 1920. It was largely chance that led Inga to seismology. In 1925, she became an assistant to the mathematician Nils Erik Norland. Nils had just become the director of the Royal Danish Geodetic Institute. He tasked Inga with setting up seismological observatories in both Denmark and Greenland. Inga also started learning how seismology could be used to learn about the Earth's inner composition. Earthquakes caused two main types of seismic waves, P waves and S waves. Scientists could use these waves to figure out what the insides of the planet were made of based on the way the waves moved through liquids and solids. Inga studied more about the topic on her own time. Her seismological career was moving swiftly. The following year, she earned a master's degree in geodesy, a branch of mathematics dealing with the shape and area of the Earth. With her new degree, she became the chief of the seismological department at the Geodetic Institute. Her role was largely administrative, but she made time for research. This was long before computers existed, but she still needed to analyze large sets of data. So Inga used cardboard oatmeal boxes. She wrote down all of the data points on pieces of cardboard and puzzled over them. One particularly important moment came in 1929, when an earthquake hit near New Zealand. Something strange happened with the P waves. They showed up across the world in Europe, at seismic stations. If the center of the Earth was liquid, as scientists thought, the waves should have been deflected by the planet's core. In 1936, when Inga was in her late 40s, she published a paper simply titled P. In it, she suggested the existence of a different internal structure of the Earth. Instead of it being all liquid, she suggested there were two parts, an inner core, which was solid, surrounded by a liquid outer core. What separated the two is now known as the Lehman discontinuity. Inga's findings were indeed correct, and in the subsequent years, other scientists corroborated her hypothesis. In step with other female scientists of her time, Inga never married. Which likely would have meant the end of her career as she knew it. Inga retired in 1953, but continued her research. She received dozens of honors, recognizing both her scientific achievement as well as her achievement as a woman in a male-dominated field. As she once said, You should know how many incompetent men I had to compete with, in vain. In 1971, Inga was awarded the American Geophysical Union's highest honor, the William Bowie Medal. Inga died in 1993, at the age of 104. In 2015, Inga's name was immortalized in two unique ways, as an asteroid and a new beetle species. All month, we're highlighting dynamos. For more information, check us out on Facebook and Instagram at Womanica Podcast. Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow!
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