The GERACLE project has officially took off on September 1, 2025. We started to prepare the paleomagnetic laboratory under the guidance of the new scientific head of the laboratory, Dr. Sophie Roud, from the beginning of the project on. The lab technicians, Martina Duwe, and our IT and lab support Alexander Jordan were introduced to the instruments and measurements to prepare solid foundations for the incoming scientists. 

The paleomagnetic laboratory of GFZ plays an important role for GERACLE. We will produce new data to provide detailed information about the geomagnetic field morphology during different magnetic field polarity excursions and reversals and to better constrain global geomagnetic field models and understand the field variations and their regional differences in detail.

On November 1, two postdocs, Louse Dauchy-Tric and Pablo Rivera Perez as well as one PhD student Shahnoor Alam joined our team at GFZ. We visited the paleomagnetic lab, where the former lab head, Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and the recently appointed head Dr. Sophie Roud explained the ongoing experiments and the measuring instruments, e.g. the cryogenic magnetometer (used to measure natural remanent magnetization, demagnetize the samples, obtain anhysteretic remanent magnetization, thus, to obtain relative paleo intensity and inclination, declination of the magnetic field), MFK1.FA (used to measure magnetic susceptivity, thermomagnetic curves and anisotropy) or alternating gradient measurements, AGM device (to obtain hysteresis loops, IRM acquisition, forc diagrams).