This January, the University of Liverpool Geomagnetism group attended Magnetic Interactions 2023 hosted by the University of Cambridge. It was a really nice to attend this historic conference in person after the difficulties over the last two years, and we thank St Andrews University in the efforts of virtually hosting during this time. We had a strong showing and presented new research on Earth’s magnetic field spanning the last 2 million years to over a 2.5 billion years ago.

The first day’s talks focussed on the solar system and rock magnetism. Our section, on  Paleomagnetism and geomagnetism, started on the second morning with the first talk from Liverpool by Simon Lloyd who provided a current overview of the age of Earth’s inner core and presented new intensity data from the Cambrian era (530 million years) highlighting the complex and often (extremely!) weak magnetic field during this time.

Brendan Cych then presented on his recently submitted study on paleointensity results from Hawaii compared to global datasets, and provided some insights ways to get better quality results from the experiments. Mary Murray asked how wobbly the Earth’s magnetic field was ~60 million years ago? She presented primary data of the variation in magnetic field directions around this time, which may be related changes in Earth’s core. Andy Biggin rounded off our session by presenting new research on the two huge antipodal blobs of hot material in the lowermost mantle and whether these leave signatures in the palaeomagnetic field? These ‘large low velocity provinces’

We also had a strong poster presence; Yael Engbers presented on a model of the long-term time-averaged geomagnetic field for the Miocene era (5 – 23 Ma), which showed remarkable similarities to the last 5 Myrs. Alex Tully demonstrated the effectiveness of a new criterion, ‘Ziggie’, for improving the reliability of palaeointensity plots. Finally, our former colleague, now global colleague Dan Thallner made it across from the university of Florida to present a poster on his latest models. Thank you to Cambridge for hosting such a great (and fun) event!