The magnetic anomaly near Kursk, Russia

The Imperial Russian Geographical Society of St. Petersburg having invited French geomagneticians to examine the distribution of the terrestrial magnetic elements in the Province of Kursk in Russia, where strikingly abnormal values of the declination, inclination, and intensity had previously arrested the attention of Russian scientists, the Minister of Public Instruction of France selected Prof. Moureaux to make a magnetic survey of that region. The Province of Kursk is situated between the parallels of 50° 20′ and 52° 20′ north latitude, and the meridians of 31° and 36° of longitude east of Paris. Prof. Moureaux set out from Paris on May 11, 1896, and, stopping at Pawlowsk to compare the instruments that were destined for use in the magnetic survey with those of the Russian magnetic observatory, in order to relate his observations to the past and future observations of the Russian investigators in the same region, arrived at Kursk on May 21st. Here he established a self‐recording magnetograph in a specially constructed subterranean apartment, and thus provided himself with the means of reducing to a common epoch the values that he subsequently observed in the field with the same portable magnetic instruments which had already been used in the determination of the magnetic elements in France and Algeria, and which are described in the Annales du Bureau Central Météorologique de France , 1884 and 1896.