Lisa Tauxe

The 2023 Petrus Peregrinus Medal is awarded to Lisa Tauxe for world leading expertise in palaeo- and rock-magnetism, development of advanced experimental methods, and far reaching service to the community via books, program packages and database.

Lisa Tauxe is widely recognized as a trailblazer in the field of palaeomagnetism.

She started working with sedimentary magnetisation, especially regarding relative palaeointensity measurements in deep-sea sediments. She has published several seminal papers including the 1993 review of methods to normalize sedimentary magnetisation. That paper documents the advantages and drawbacks of different techniques and has become the leading reference in this field.

After working also on volcanic glass and igneous rocks, she recently expanded her research to archeomagnetic materials. In particular, those from the Levant. This recently led her with her students and colleagues to show the archeomagnetic occurrence of very abrupt increases in the field strength to very high values (spikes). After numerous criticisms and by continuous efforts to defend their claims, she and her colleagues are gradually convincing experimentalists and modelers to accept the concept of these spikes. This is an important contribution to the understanding of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Lisa Tauxe proposed innovative technical approaches and among many applications, the method she proposed with D. Kent to detect and correct inclination shallowing in sedimentary rocks motivated many new investigations.

The program packages and books she wrote, constantly up-dated and made freely available online are of great benefit for the community and considered as reference texts and cookbooks. Very sensitive to the open data policy, she is the founding core member of the extensive database for palaeomagnetism (MagIC of Earthref.org).

For her curiosity, creativity, and novel approaches in palaeomagnetism besides her continuous training of young scientists and pedagogical services to the community, Lisa Tauxe is an outstanding recipient for the Petrus Peregrinus Medal.