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  1. Home > Articles & Issues >
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  3. Joint Bayesian infer ...
Article

Joint Bayesian inference of Earth's magnetic field and core surface flow on millennial timescales

Andreas Nilsson, Neil Suttie, Marie Troyano, Nicolas Gillet, Julien Aubert, Anders Irbäck
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Submitted on
January 16, 2026
Accepted on
March 26, 2026
Published on
March 30, 2026
Last modified on
April 8, 2026
Volume 2
Volume 2
DOI
10.46298/jsedi.17320
License
Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
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Joint Bayesian inference of Earth's magnetic field and core surface flow on millennial timescales

Andreas Nilsson, Neil Suttie, Marie Troyano, Nicolas Gillet, Julien Aubert, Anders Irbäck
Abstract
Understanding Earth's core dynamics over millennial timescales requires models that jointly describe the evolution of the geomagnetic field and core surface flow, while accommodating the sparse, irregular, and uncertain nature of archaeomagnetic and palaeomagnetic data. We present a new Bayesian core field and core flow modelling framework that utilises archaeo/palaeomagnetic data directly, combining a reduced stochastic representation of core surface dynamics derived from numerical geodynamo statistics with a probabilistic treatment of observational and chronological uncertainties. A key innovation is an efficient discrete marginalisation of age uncertainties, which avoids the convergence difficulties associated with co-estimating ages in high-dimensional Hamiltonian Monte Carlo inversions. The framework aims to reconstruct the coupled evolution of the geomagnetic field and core surface flow over the past 9000 years while preserving dynamical correlations implied by the prior geodynamo time series. Tests using synthetic data generated from an Earth-like geodynamo demonstrate that the method reliably recovers large-scale geomagnetic field variations and key aspects of core dynamics, including long-term westward drift and the evolution of planetary-scale eccentric gyres. These results show that, when combined with physically informed priors, archaeo/palaeomagnetic data can constrain millennial-scale core flow, paving the way for reconstructions based on real data. 19 pages, 13 figures
Keywords
  • Geophysics
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