Africa was still far south in the Late Ypresian: Paleomagnetic study on the early Eocene 'Minia' formation in central Egypt

The assessment of the natural remanence during the progressive stepwise thermal demagnetization [15-17 steps] of all samples, elucidated the early decay [<150 °C] of a present- day field [PDF] overprint component scattered around the magnetic field direction of the study area. Despite that, the anchored component in most samples was carried in magnetite, yet hematite was recorded in few sites. The visual inspection of the decay spectra in the orthogonal projections, followed by the determination of the best-fit line of every component using the principal component analysis [PCA] technique, differentiated between the magnetite- and hematite- remanence components: