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

Yohan Guyodo () and Jean-Pierre Valet ()
Additional contact information
Yohan Guyodo: Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, UMR CNRS 7577, 4
Jean-Pierre Valet: Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, UMR CNRS 7577, 4

Nature, 1999, vol. 399, issue 6733, 249-252

Abstract: 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.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/20420 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:399:y:1999:i:6733:d:10.1038_20420

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/20420

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().