Reply to Comment on “Historical measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field compared with remanence directions from lava flows in Italy over the last four centuries”, by Tanguy J.C., Principe C., Arrighi S.

Abstract

A comparison of the geomagnetic directions derived from lava flows of Italian volcanoes with those derived from direct historical measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field (Lanza et al., 2005) yielded two main results: (1) The general agreement between the two data sets already noted by previous authors (Rolph et al., 1987; Incoronato et al., 2002; Tanguy et al., 2003) was better substantiated. (2) The thermal remanent magnetization (TRM) direction of most flows was shown to deviate from the corresponding historical direction by a small angle θ. In most cases, this angle was larger than the experimental error on the TRM direction as given by the α95 semi-angle of confidence of Fisher’s statistics, i.e. θ > α95. The conclusion drawn from these results was straightforward: a better understanding of the causes of the TRM deviation is required if we are to fully exploit the precision of TRM data from Italian volcanoes when their α95 value is less than 2.5–3.0◦.