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Palaeomagnetism

Core message

Nature Geoscience volume 1, pages 345–346 (2008)Cite this article

Archaean and early Proterozoic rocks reveal that the Earth's magnetic field two billion years ago behaved differently than over most of the past 200 million years. Do these changes relate to the growth of the inner core?

Remarkably, igneous rocks, which are formed from magma, are magnetized permanently as they cool, at a level that is proportional to the ambient magnetic field at the time. Provided that no later significant thermal, chemical or other event affects this magnetization (which relevant tests can assess), such rocks provide natural spot readings of the past geomagnetic field. The direction from those readings can be used to infer a so-called virtual geomagnetic pole, which marks the position of the pole of the geomagnetic field that would have led to the observed magnetization. If one avoids rock units affected by local tectonics, virtual geomagnetic poles from all rocks of a common geographical site with similar ages can be used to produce an average location for the virtual geomagnetic pole, and an estimate of the dispersion about that average.

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Figure 1

COR LANGEREIS

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gauthier Hulot is at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Université Paris Diderot, INSU/CNRS, 4 Place Jussieu, 75252, Paris cedex 05, France. gh@ipgp.jussieu.fr,

    Gauthier Hulot

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Hulot, G. Core message. Nature Geosci 1, 345–346 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo213

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