Core sampling at CEREGE
Louise Dauchy-Tric and Shahnoor Alam from GFZ went on March 16-19, 2026 to the CEREGE (Research and teaching centre environmental geosciences; France) to sample the giant piston core IMAGES MD97-2141, retrieved in the Sulu Sea (Philippines).
The 36m-long core, covering the last ~390k years, has been widely studied in order to reconstruct the East Asian monsoon dynamics. We sampled the 60-30 ka and the 210-160 ka intervals, covering the Laschamp excursion (~41 ka) and the Iceland Basin excursion (~190 ka), respectively. In total, approximately 450 paleomagnetic cubes were taken. Several magnetic parameters, such as the magnetic susceptibility, the natural remanent magnetization (NRM), the anhysteretic remanent magnetization (ARM), and the isothermal remanent magnetization (IRM) will be measured in order to reconstruct the past variations of the Earth’s magnetic field (inclination, declination, relative paleointensity). The results obtained will allow us to better constrain the behaviour of the geomagnetic field during the Laschamp excursion and the Iceland Basin excursion, in an area with few data available.