The time-averaged geomagnetic field as recorded by lava flows over the past 5 Myr

A recently compiled lava flow data base spanning the last 5 million years is used to investigate properties of the time-averaged geomagnetic field. More than 90 per cent of the power in the palaeofield can be accounted for by a geocentric axial dipole; however, there are significant second-order structures in the field. Declination and inclination anomalies for the new data base indicate that the main second-order signal is the ‘far-sided’effect, and there is also evidence for non-zonal structure. VGP (virtual geomagnetic pole) latitude distributions indicate that, over the last 5 million years, normal and reverse polarity morphologies are different, and that any changes in the normal polarity field morphology are undetectable, given the present data distribution. Regularized non-linear inversions of the palaeomagnetic directions support all these observations. We test the hypothesis that zonal models for the time-averaged field are adequate to describe the data and find that they are not. Non-zonal models are needed to fit the data to within the required tolerance level. Normal and reverse polarity field models obtained are significantly different. Field models obtained for the Brunhes epoch data alone are much smoother than those obtained from combining all the normal polarity data; simulations indicate that these differences can be explained by the less extensive data distribution for the Brunhes epoch. The field model for all of the normal polarity data (LN1) contains features observed in the historical field maps, although the details differ. LN1 suggests that, although the two northern hemisphere flux lobes observed in the historical field are stationary to a first-order approximation, they do show changes in position and amplitude. A third, less pronounced flux lobe is observed in LN1 over central Europe. The lack of structure in the southern hemisphere is due in part to the paucity of data. Jackknife estimates of the field models for different subsets of the data suggest that a few sites contribute significant structure to the final field models. More conservative estimates of the time-averaged field morphology are obtained by removing these sites.