TY - JOUR AB - The Day diagram is used extensively in rock magnetism for domain state diagnosis. It has been shown recently to be fundamentally ambiguous for 10 sets of reasons. This ambiguity highlights the urgency for adopting suitable alternative approaches to identify the domain state of magnetic mineral components in rock magnetic studies. We evaluate 10 potential alternative approaches here and conclude that four have value for identifying data trends, but, like the Day diagram, they are affected by use of bulk parameters that compromise domain state diagnosis in complex samples. Three approaches based on remanence curve and hysteresis loop unmixing, when supervised by independent data to avoid nonuniqueness of solutions, provide valuable componentspecific information that can be linked by inference to domain state. Three further approaches based on firstorder reversal curve diagrams provide direct domain state diagnosis with varying effectiveness. Environmentally important highcoercivity hematite and goethite are represented with variable effectiveness in the evaluated candidate approaches. These minerals occur predominantly in noninteracting singledomain particle assemblages in paleomagnetic contexts, so domain state diagnosis is more critical for ferrimagnetic minerals. Treating the highcoercivity component separately following normal rock magnetic procedures allows focus on the more vexing problem of diagnosing domain state in ferrimagnetic mineral assemblages. We suggest a move away from nondiagnostic methods based on bulk parameters and adoption of approaches that provide unambiguous componentspecific domain state identification, among which various firstorder reversal curvebased approaches provide diagnostic information. AU - Roberts,AP AU - Hu,P AU - Harrison,RJ AU - Heslop,D AU - Muxworthy,AR AU - Oda,H AU - Sato,T AU - Tauxe,L AU - Zhao,X DO - 10.1029/2018jb017049 EP - 5314 PY - 2019/// SN - 2169-9313 SP - 5286 TI - Domain state diagnosis in rock magnetism: evaluation of potential alternatives to the Day diagram T2 - Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2018jb017049 UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/70255 VL - 124 ER -