Earth's magnetic field "is just returning back to its long-term average," not weakening toward a reversal, says
paleomagnetist Dennis Kent of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J.
Of course, other people wanted to learn too--Jerry McManus, a sedimentologist from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and David Williamson, a French paleomagnetist, both became very good.
At the watch change it was usually bustling, with eight sedimentologists, four physical properties specialists, two paleomagnetists, two to four core samplers, and many technicians, as well as the odd "tourists"--people like geochemists, loggers, and co-chief scientists based elsewhere in the lab stack but passing through to see the cores and to hear the old watch briefing the new.
Dennis Kent, a
paleomagnetist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., says it would be "a curious coincidence" to have two brief lava flows just happen to cool and capture a 53-degree change in direction, when reversals happen only a few times per million years.
Previously a landlubbing
paleomagnetist who wallowed in the Paleozoic, the Precambrian, and in directional statistics, he was lured into love with marine geoscience through representing UK on the JOIDES executive committee, of which he is chair-elect.
Although the strength of the Earth's magnetic field is now dropping, it is 50 percent stronger than the estimated average for the past 60 million years, says Lisa Tauxe, a
paleomagnetist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
These reversals of the geomagnetic poles leave a record in rocks that are of value to
paleomagnetists in calculating geomagnetic fields in the past.
The book is intended for
paleomagnetists, students, and earth scientists using sedimentary paleomagnetic data.
Laj and other
paleomagnetists spent the decade roving the world, accumulating records of times when the magnetic field reversed itself, switching north pole for south and then back again.
Paleomagnetists reconstruct maps of past continental configurations by observing how the orientations of magnetic fields in rocks differ from the earth's field today.
Paleomagnetists know from scrutinizing the magnetic orientation of rocks in the oceanic crust that the field completely reverses direction about every half-million years.
And in the northwest corner of Wyoming, the
paleomagnetists have also found waves of titanohematite flooding sedimentary sections of the Big Horn Basin, where some magnetite is present but only in extremely small amounts.