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Global changes in intensity of the Earth's magnetic field during the past 800 kyr

Nature volume 399, pages 249–252 (1999)Cite this article

Abstract

Recent advances in palaeomagnetic and dating techniques have led to increasingly precise records of the relative intensity of the Earth's past magnetic field at numerous field sites. The compilation and analysis of these records can provide important constraints on changes in global magnetic field intensity and therefore on the Earth's geodynamo itself. A previous compilation for the past 200 kyr integrated 17 marine records into a composite curve1, with the geomagnetic origin of the signal supported by an independent analysis of 10Be production made on different cores2. The persistence of long-term features in the Earth's magnetic intensity or the existence of long-term periodic changes cannot, however, be resolved in this relatively short time span. Here we present the integration of 33 records of relative palaeointensity3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 into a composite curve spanning the past 800 kyr. We find that the intensity of the Earth's dipole field has experienced large-amplitude variations over this time period with pronounced intensity minima coinciding with known excursions in field direction, reflecting the emergence of non-dipole components. No stable periodicity was found in our composite record and therefore our data set does not support the hypothesis that the Earth's orbital parameters have a direct and strong influence on the geodynamo.

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Figure 1: Synthetic record (Sint-800) with its standard error obtained from the stack of 33 records of palaeointensity.
Figure 2: Tests of our synthetic record, Sint-800.
Figure 3: Spectral analysis of Sint-800 using the Blackman–Tukey method with a Bartless window.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. E. T. Channell, C. Laj, L. Meynadier, D. A. Schneider, J. S. Stoner, L. Tauxe and T. Yamazaki for supplying data, and F. C. Bennett for comments. This work was supported by the CNRS-INSU program Intérieur de la Terre. At this University of Florida, Y.G. was supported by a grant awarded to J. E. T. Channell.

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  1. Yohan Guyodo

    Present address: Department of Geology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 32611, USA

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  1. Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, UMR CNRS 7577, 4, Place Jussieu, 75262 , Paris, Cedex 05, France

    Yohan Guyodo & Jean-Pierre Valet

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Correspondence to Yohan Guyodo.

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Guyodo, Y., Valet, JP. Global changes in intensity of the Earth's magnetic field during the past 800 kyr. Nature 399, 249–252 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/20420

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