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Palaeomagnetism is the study of past variations in the Earth’s magnetic field as reconstructed from the rock and archaeological records. In addition to providing information about the intensity, polarity, declination and inclination of the Earth’s magnetic field, rock magnetism also reveals the movements of continents and ocean crust through time.
An ultra-weak magnetic field from Earth’s core lasting for at least 26 million years may have contributed to Earth’s oxygenation and further diversification of the Ediacaran fauna, according to single-crystal paleointensity data from igneous rocks in South Africa and Brazil.
Persistent millennial Asian winter monsoon variability is shown to be superposed on orbital 41-kyr and 100-kyr cycles across the Pliocene–Pleistocene glacial intensification using a paleomagnetically dated high-resolution Chinese Loess Plateau grain size record.
The authors report three palaeomagnetic poles from the North China craton and document a large round-trip true polar wander oscillation during 155−141 Ma that may have affected biotic evolution in East Asia and global extinction and endemism.
Deposition of 1.2-billion-year-old Indian limestone in shallow seas near the poles imply balmy conditions of more than 15 °C and significantly higher atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, which expands the spectrum of Earth’s climatic extremes.
Magnetite is found throughout the Earth system and has many uses, explains Barbara Maher. It is a tracer of plate tectonic movements, a sub-cellular navigation aid and an economic resource, but also a pollutant.
Ocean-floor plateaus are not voluminous lava flows from central volcanoes as thought, but anomalously thick oceanic crust, suggest magnetic anomaly patterns from the Shatsky Rise, in the northwestern Pacific Ocean.
Transition from a weak and erratic geomagnetic field to a more stable one around 560 million years ago, inferred from palaeomagnetic measurements, suggests that the inner core may have solidified around that time, much later than thought.
Despite legislation to protect natural sites, rock outcrops are being damaged in the name of science. Scientists, funders and publishers must push forward a stronger code of ethics.