Novel insights on the geomagnetic field in West Africa from a new intensity reference curve (0-2000 AD).

ABSTRACT: The geomagnetic field variations on the continent of Africa are still largely undeciphered for the past two millennia. In spite of archaeological artefacts being reliable recorders of the ancient geomagnetic field strength, only few data have been reported for this continent so far. Here we use the Thellier-Coe and calibrated pseudo-Thellier methods to recover archaeointensity data from Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast (West Africa) from well-dated archaeological artefacts. By combining our 18 new data with previously published data from West Africa, we construct a reference curve for West Africa for the past 2000 years. To obtain a reliable curve of the archaeointensity variation, we evaluate a penalized smoothing spline fit and a stochastic modelling method, both combined with a bootstrap ap

SUBMITTER: Kapper L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6981143 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature