Premium
Unveiling Earth's Hidden Magnetization
Author(s) -
Vervelidou Foteini,
Lesur Vincent
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2018gl079876
Subject(s) - magnetization , lithosphere , earth's magnetic field , geophysics , orbital magnetization , geology , physics , condensed matter physics , magnetic field , magnetic anisotropy , tectonics , seismology , quantum mechanics
Rock magnetization carries information about rocks' properties, Earth's tectonic history, and evolution of its core magnetic field. One way to study Earth's magnetization is through the magnetic signal it generates, known as the lithospheric magnetic field. Although there exist global lithospheric magnetic field models of high spatial resolution, this path has not yet been very fruitful because of an important limitation: only part of the magnetization is visible , that is, produces an observable magnetic field signal. We refer to the remaining part of the magnetization as the hidden magnetization, and we recover it from a lithospheric magnetic field model under a few reasonable assumptions. We find that Earth's hidden magnetization at high and middle latitudes is very similar, both in intensity and shape, to Earth's visible magnetization. At low latitudes, the estimated hidden magnetization relies on a priori information and can be very different from the visible one.