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Combining groups of paleomagnetic directions or poles
Author(s) -
McFadden P. L.,
McElhinny M. W.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/95gl01441
Subject(s) - paleomagnetism , group (periodic table) , cretaceous , secular variation , geology , geodesy , variation (astronomy) , simple (philosophy) , paleontology , mathematics , physics , geophysics , astrophysics , philosophy , epistemology , quantum mechanics
A simple method is derived for combining the results from m groups of paleomagnetic directions or poles where the groups may have widely differing numbers and where the resultant vectors for the individual groups are not known. Numerical experiments with Fisher distributions show that, given a reasonable number of group means, surprisingly reliable values for R can be obtained even if the group precisions vary widely. An important advantage of this method is that one does not have to consider whether each group by itself is sufficient to average secular variation. Even a single VGP can be included as one of the groups. As an example the method is applied to combining the Cretaceous poles for North America.