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Transforming understanding of paleomagnetic recording in igneous rocks: Insights from aging experiments on lava samples and the causes and consequences of ‘fragile’ curvature in Arai plots
  • +4
  • Lisa Tauxe,
  • Christeanne N. Santos,
  • Brendan Cych,
  • Xiang Zhao,
  • Andrew P. Roberts,
  • Lesleis Nagy,
  • Wyn Williams
Lisa Tauxe
University of California, San Diego, University of California, San Diego

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Christeanne N. Santos
University of California, San Diego, University of California, San Diego
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Brendan Cych
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
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Xiang Zhao
Australian National University, Australian National University
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Andrew P. Roberts
Australian National University, Australian National University
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Lesleis Nagy
University of Caifornia, San Diego
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Wyn Williams
University of Edinburgh
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Abstract

The theory for recording of thermally blocked remanences predicts a quasi-linear relationship between low fields like the Earth’s in which rocks cool and acquire a magnetization. This serves as the foundation for estimating ancient magnetic field strengths. Addressing long-standing questions concerning Earth’s magnetic field require a global paleointensity dataset, but recovering the ancient field strength is complicated because the theory only pertains to uniformly magnetized particles. A key requirement of a paleointensity experiment is that a magnetization blocked at a given temperature should be unblocked by zero-field reheating to the same temperature. However, failure of this requirement occurs frequently and the causes and consequences of failure are poorly understood. Recent experiments demonstrate that the remanence in many samples typical of those used in paleointensity experiments is unstable, and exhibits an ”aging’ effect in which the unblocking temperature spectrum changes over only a few years resulting in non-ideal experimental behavior. While a fresh remanenence may conform to the requirement of equality of blocking and unblocking temperatures, aged remanences may not. Blocking temperature spectra can be unstable (fragile), which precludes reproduction of the conditions under which the original magnetization was acquired. This limits our ability to acquire accurate and precise ancient magnetic field strength estimates because differences between known and estimated fields can be significant (up to 10 μT) for individual specimens, with a low field bias. Fragility of unblocking temperature spectra appears to be related to grain size and may be related to features observed in first-order reversal curves.