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SUMMARY Understanding the temporal changes of the Earth’s magnetic field intensity is one of the main goals of modern palaeomagnetism. For most palaeointensity methods to yield reliable results, the magnetic minerals must obey a set of rules. One of these rules is the additivity of partial thermal (TRM) or anhysteretic remanent magnetizations (ARM). Additivity was previously shown for partial TRM in single-domain particles and more generally for ARMs. Additivity between these two low-field remanences, however, has not been investigated, yet. This paper presents a series of rock magnetic experiments on natural low Ti titanomagnetites (Curie temperature between 534 °C and 561 °C) examining the effects of high temperatures on alternating field (AF) demagnetization and acquisition of an ARM. One of our sample sets comes from a borehole drilled through the impact melt sheet of the Manicouagan crater (Canada), the other from the Rocche Rosse lava flow on the island of Lipari (Italy). Hysteresis parameters indicate the magnetic carriers in the pseudo-single-domain range showing no evidence for oxidation. Thermal demagnetization at 300 °C and 500 °C before AF demagnetization shifts the coercivity spectra towards higher fields. AF demagnetization experiments at 500 °C show a significant (by a factor between 1.4 and >7.6) reduction in median destructive field and a shift towards lower coercivities. A linear relationship was found between the peak magnetic field required to demagnetize a fraction of a full TRM of a sample at a specific temperature and the one necessary to demagnetize the same fraction at room temperature after heating to that temperature. The comparison of full ARM and partial TRM at successively higher temperatures with a hybrid hTARM reveals that combined additivity between the two kinds of remanences is fulfilled. These results open the possibility to demagnetize highly coercive minerals, such as hematite and goethite, which is often not achievable at elevated temperatures. Furthermore, the additivity of TRM and ARM remanences may be used to develop novel hybrid TRM/ARM palaeointensity methods for samples, where heating is problematic (e.g. in meteorites).
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This content will become publicly available on August 6, 2025
Thermal rock magnetic cycling (TRMC): a method to track thermal alteration details for palaeointensity interpretations
SUMMARY Accurate absolute palaeointensity is essential for understanding dynamo processes on the Earth and other planetary bodies. Although great efforts have been made to propose techniques to obtain magnetic field strength from rock samples, such as Thellier-series methods, the amount of high-fidelity palaeointensities remains limited. One primary reason for this is the thermal alteration of samples that pervasively occurred during palaeointensity experiments. In this study, we developed a comprehensive rock magnetic experiment, termed thermal rock magnetic cycling (TRMC), that can utilize measurements of critical rock magnetic properties at elevated temperatures during multiple heating-cooling cycles to track thermal changes in bulk samples and individual magnetic components with different Curie temperatures in samples for palaeointensity interpretations. We demonstrate this method on a Galapagos lava sample, GA 84.6. The results for this specimen revealed that GA 84.6v underwent thermophysical alteration throughout the TRMC experiment, resulting in changes in its remanence carrying capacity. These findings were then used to interpret the palaeointensity results of specimen GA 84.6c, which revealed that the two-slope Arai plot yielded two linear segments with distinct palaeointensity values that were both biased by thermophysical alteration. To further test the TRMC method, we selected another historical lava sample (HS 2) from Mt Lassen, detecting slight thermal-physical changes after heating the specimen HS 2–8C to a target temperature of 400 °C. We also isolated a stable magnetic component with a Curie temperature below 400 °C using the TRMC method, which may provide a more reliable palaeointensity estimate of 51 μT. By providing a method for tracking thermal alteration independent of palaeointensity experiments, the TRMC method can explore subtle, unrecognizable thermal alteration processes in less detailed palaeointensity measurements, which can help to assess the thermal stability of the measured samples and interpret the changes in the TRM unblocking spectrum and palaeointensity estimates, facilitating the acquisition of more reliable records for constrain the formation of the inner core and the evolution of Earth's magnetic field.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2153786
- PAR ID:
- 10555664
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geophysical Journal International
- Volume:
- 239
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0956-540X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 218 to 235
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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