Abstract
Many palaeomagnetists believe that, when properly measured, geomagnetic intensities can be obtained with a precision of better than 10% (R. S. Coe, personal communication). But published results do not appear to support this view1–5: the reproducibility of intensities are, not only from laboratory to laboratory1,2, but also within laboratories3–5, in the range 50–100%, whether the Thelliers6 method or the Shaw7 method is used8. As the precision of laboratory techniques is a few per cent, the most likely source of errors of this magnitude is mineral alteration due to heating during sample processing. Here I describe a technique capable of measuring the effect of alteration, allowing its contribution to be subtracted from the data. This work also shows that these errors can be systematic, confirming a previous finding9.
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References
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Walton, D. Improving the accuracy of geomagnetic intensity measurements. Nature 328, 789–791 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/328789a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/328789a0
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