Abstract

The fact that the geodynamo has reversed multiple times over Earth’s history is well established. However, details of the process remain poorly understood. Despite a steadily growing amount of paleomagnetic data, there are gaps in global coverage and inherent limitations exist concerning accuracy and temporal resolution of these data. The full global understanding not only of polarity reversals (including short-lived excursions), but of the long-term field evolution in general remains incomplete.  I present results of recent efforts to reconstruct the global geomagnetic field evolution over the past 100 000 years, with a particular focus on the field exursions that occurred within this interval when the field lost its dipole dominance, and of the global field evolution over the 200 000 years surrounding the last full polarity reversal. The new spherical harmonic inverse models of these events can conveniently be used for direct comparisons of field characteristics to dynamo simulation runs, but implicit model uncertainties should not be neglected.