Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A geomagnetic reversal is a change in a planet's dipole magnetic field such that the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south are interchanged (not to be confused with geographic north and geographic south). The Earth's magnetic field has alternated between periods of normal polarity, in which the predominant direction of the field was ...
Earth's magnetic field, predominantly dipolar at its surface, is distorted further out by the solar wind. This is a stream of charged particles leaving the Sun's corona and accelerating to a speed of 200 to 1000 kilometres per second. They carry with them a magnetic field, the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF).
The Laschamp or Laschamps event [note 1] was a geomagnetic excursion (a short reversal of the Earth's magnetic field). It occurred between 42,200 and 41,500 years ago, during the end of the Last Glacial Period. It was discovered from geomagnetic anomalies found in the Laschamps and Olby lava flows near Clermont-Ferrand, France in the 1960s. [1][2]
Paleomagnetism (occasionally palaeomagnetism) is the study of prehistoric Earth's magnetic fields recorded in rocks, sediment, or archeological materials. Geophysicists who specialize in paleomagnetism are called paleomagnetists. Certain magnetic minerals in rocks can record the direction and intensity of Earth's magnetic field at the time they ...
Magnetostratigraphy is a geophysical correlation technique used to date sedimentary and volcanic sequences. The method works by collecting oriented samples at measured intervals throughout the section. The samples are analyzed to determine their characteristic remanent magnetization (ChRM), that is, the polarity of Earth's magnetic field at the ...
Archaeomagnetic dating is the study and interpretation of the signatures of the Earth's magnetic field at past times recorded in archaeological materials. These paleomagnetic signatures are fixed when ferromagnetic materials such as magnetite cool below the Curie point, freezing the magnetic moment of the material in the direction of the local magnetic field at that time.
The Brunhes–Matuyama reversal, named after Bernard Brunhes and Motonori Matuyama, was a geologic event, approximately 781,000 years ago, when the Earth's magnetic field last underwent reversal. [1][2] Estimations vary as to the abruptness of the reversal. A 2004 paper estimated that it took over several thousand years; [3] a 2010 paper ...
Magnetic hysteresis occurs when an external magnetic field is applied to a ferromagnet such as iron and the atomic dipoles align themselves with it. Even when the field is removed, part of the alignment will be retained: the material has become magnetized. Once magnetized, the magnet will stay magnetized indefinitely.