A main motivation for the study is to extend the GEOMAGIA50 database, especially for the earliest parts of the Holocene were few data exists. Iceland is an ideal location for these kinda studies given the large amounts of well-dated lavas. As can be seen from the map above, we sampled quite a few lava flows.
An interesting aspect of the study is the finding of very high paleointensities in a 2300 year old lava. Our study suggest that the geomagnetic field was roughly twice as strong at that time as it is today. A lot more paleomagnetic work could be done on Iceland - What we show is that it is possible to sample the Holocene Icelandic lavas (see photo below), and that the lavas are well suited for paleointensity experiments.
Drilling a Holocene lava flow close to Myvatn (Myvatn fires)
Drilling another Holocene lava (Burfellsrhaun)
Dr. Mads Knudsen in search of the Jamaica geomagnetic polarity event on Hlodufell
GEOMAGIA50 is a web application designed to give easy access to all peer-review-published paleomagnetic data for the past 50 000 years. At present, the underlying database contains c. 8000 determinations of geomagnetic field directions and intensities.
It is quite easy to use the application to get access to the data and at the same time generate plots showing different representations of the data. Please try it out for yourself: http://geomagia.ucsd.edu/geomagia/
I worked on GEOMAGIA50 together with Fabio Donadini and Kimmo Korhonen back in 2006-2007. It is very pleasing to see that these guys continue to maintain and update the database and web application. At the time of writing GEOMAGIA50 has a monthly count of more than 200 unique users querying the database.
GEOMAGIA50 represent my first experience to make scientific data available on the internet. It was fun and interesting. Unfortunately there is little or no encouragement for scientists to share their data, so it is not something a young scientist can afford to spend a lot of time doing if he wants to build a scientific career. It is a shame that the scientific communities does not support these kinda efforts.
