To understand how continental sediments acquire their magnetic records through automized remanence anisotropy experiments

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An important flaw in paleomagnetism is accurately determining geomagnetic field inclination in sediments, which are the most abundant rock type on the Earth's surface. Because paleolatitude is calculated directly from inclination, aberrations in the recording process of magnetic inclination lead to erroneous estimates of latitudinal transport. Shallow paleolatitudes pose a particular dilemma in central Asia, where unrealistic amounts of tectonic shortening are implied. This distorts our knowledge of how deformation has occurred in response to the India-Asia collision. Continental sediments elsewhere can show no or little evidence for inclination shallowing. Unfortunately, most techniques to quantify the magnitude of inclination shallowing integrate over all the grains in the rock and not only those that carry the magnetic remanence. An exception is the anisotropy of anhysteretic remanent magnetization method, which can be applied to the fraction of the grains that hold the remanence. However, this technique is so timeconsuming that studies on large numbers of samples are non-existent. We propose to remedy this by building a fully automated system to measure the magnetic anisotropy of >100 samples at a time, and apply the method to Neogene samples from Central Asia.