Miriam Gómez Paccard. Birth: 16/06/1977 in Santander, Spain.Children: Three (born 2008, 2009 and 2014)

Researcher unique identifier: RID I-4077-2015, ORCID: 0000-0002-9339-3047, Scopus Author ID:  23976050300

 I am a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Institute of Geociences IGEO (CSIC, UCM). The backbone of my research career is to understand the dynamics of the Earth´s magnetic field in the past and its application to solve different problems in a broad range of disciplines within the Earth Sciences, such as geomagnetism, paleoclimatology, geochronology, stratigraphy, basin analysis, tectonics and archeology. My primary research interest lies in the fields of Geo(Paleo)magnetism. I am particularly specialized on high-quality geomagnetic field intensity reconstructions. This research line is essential not only to provide crucial data from unstudied regions essential to develop higher-resolution geomagnetic field models but also new geophysical constraints (such as the timing and duration of past abrupt geomagnetic field changes) to be used by and compared with Earth´s dynamo simulations.  My research career is summarized below.

My expertise in the field of paleomagnetism derives from my PhD research conducted at the CNRS (Géosciences-Rennes, France) between 2003 and 2006, within the framework of the Research Training Network AARCH: Archaeomagnetic Applications for the Rescue of Cultural Heritage funded by the EU. The aim of the AARCH network, in which 12 of the main European paleomagnetic and rock-magnetic laboratories participated, was to investigate the paleosecular variation of the Earth´s magnetic field in Europe as recorded by heated archeological materials. I was in charge of the application of the paleomagnetic technique to archeological features from Western Europe and I was particularly involved on the acquisition of high-quality paleointensity data. My PhD research produced the first secular variation curve for the Iberian Peninsula (Figure 1, Gómez-Paccard et al., 2006, ref #4), which is nowadays used as a new dating tool for archeological remains from this region (e.g. Gómez-Paccard and Beamud, 2008, ref #9).

After my PhD, I conducted my research through funding obtained in individual competitive grants (such as the Juan de la Cierva, JAE-Doc, Marie Curie and Ramón y Cajal programs) and worked in different research institutions from France and Spain devoted to Earth Sciences. During this period I worked on the application of the paleomagnetic and environmental-magnetic techniques to date and identify Holocene climate variability as recorded by continental sediments. My IEF Marie Curie project “Paleomagnetic applications for dating and identifying Holocene climate variability in southwestern Europe and the Azores Islands as recorded by lake sediments” was focused on a double objective: to recover both the geomagnetic and climatic changes from the study of lacustrine sedimentary sequences. My main results related to the paleomagnetic and rock-magnetic studies of continental sequences are: 1) the first paleomagnetic results of Holocene sediments from Lake Issyk-Kul  and its implication in paleosecular variation changes in central Asia, a region that is key for unraveling teleconnections between high- and low-latitude climatic processes (Gómez-Paccard et al., 2012, ref #14) and 2) the application of the rock-magnetic approach to study the environmental response of fragile, semiarid landscape to Early Holocene climate variability (Gómez-Paccard et al., 2013, ref #19). During my post-doctoral stages I continued to work on the high-resolution reconstructions of secular variation changes. Thanks to different international collaborations I am currently involved on different paleomagnetic studies and projects devoted to regional geomagnetic field characterization in Western Europe, Greece, North Africa, Mexico, Argentina, and Central Asia. I am particularly interested in the study of abrupt changes of the geomagnetic field intensity in the past (Gómez-Paccard et al., 2012, 2016, refs #17, 23).