Four Centuries of the Geocentric Axial Dipole Hypothesis

William Gilbert first articulated what has come to be known as the geocentric axial dipole hypothesis. The GAD hypothesis is the principle on which paleogeographic reconstructions rely to constrain paleolatitude. For decades there have been calls for permanent non-dipole contributions to the time averaged field. Recently, these have demanded large contributions of the axial octupole, which, if valid, would call into question the general utility of the GAD hypothesis. In the process of geological recording of the geomagnetic field, ``Earth filters'' distort the directions. Many processes, for example, sedimentary inclination error and random tilting lead to a net shallowing of the observed direction. Therefore inclinations that are shallower than expected from GAD can be explained by recording biases, northward transport, or non-dipole geomagnetic fields. Using paleomagnetic data from the last five million years from well constrained lava flow data allows the construction of a statistical geomagnetic field model. Such a model can predict not only the average expected direction for a given latitude, but also the shape of the distribution of directions produced by secular variation. This allows us to differentiate among the possible explanations for shallow bias. We find no compelling reason to abandon the geocentric dipole hypothesis that has served us well for four centuries.