Nature of the Jurassic Magnetic Quiet Zone

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 42 (2015): 8367–8372, doi:10.1002/2015GL065394.The nature of the Jurassic Quiet Zone (JQZ), a region of low-amplitude oceanic magnetic anomalies, has been a long-standing debate with implications for the history and behavior of the Earth's geomagnetic field and plate tectonics. To understand the origin of the JQZ, we studied high-resolution sea surface magnetic anomalies from the Hawaiian magnetic lineations and correlated them with the Japanese magnetic lineations. The comparison shows the following: (i) excellent correlation of anomaly shapes from M29 to M42; (ii) remarkable similarity of anomaly amplitude envelope, which decreases back in time from M19 to M38, with a minimum at M41, then increases back in time from M42; and (iii) refined locations of pre-M25 lineations in the Hawaiian lineation set. Based on these correlations, our study presents evidence of regionally and possibly globally coherent pre-M29 magnetic anomalies in the JQZ and a robust extension of Hawaiian isochrons back to M42 in the Pacific crust.National Science Foundation Grant Numbers: OCE-1029965, OCE-1233000, OCE-10295732016-04-2