Lake sediments as recorders of geomagnetic field variations — applications to dating post-Glacial sediments

Field and laboratory methods, developed to recover the record of past secular variations of geomagnetic declination and inclination carried by the remanent magnetization of some lake sediments, are described. Type curves, delineating these parameters through post-Glacial time, have now been constructed for Europe and east-central N. America. These curves, once established for any region, are useful for dating lake sediments from that region. The principal inclination features exhibited by the European curves can also be identified along the N. American curves with a delay of some 600 years, on average.