Geomagnetic field reversals: Main results and basic problems

Abstract

[2] The geomagnetic field reversals seem to be among the most interesting phenomena discovered by the science in the 20th century. Naturally, the process of their operation attracted the attention of geoscientists who began to study them at the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s [Momose, 1958; Nomura, 1963; Petrova and Rybak, 1963; Sigurgeirsson, 1957; Van Zijl et al., 1962]. The characteristics of the geomagnetic field during its reversals, that is, during its transitions from one polarity to another, were and still are of great interest to the geoscientists, because the phenomenology of the processes of the destruction and reconstruction of the stationary magnetic moment, apparently reflecting the characteristics of the processes that violate the mechanism of its generation and reconstruction, might provide information for the operation of the dynamo mechanism, might help to understand its physical essence and broaden our knowledge about the structure of the Earth’s deep envelopes, and of the processes operating in them in the scale of geological time. Moreover, the discovery of the fact that each individual inversion has its own distinctive features which can be used to recognize it in the paleomagnetic rock sequences, would increase the value of the magnetostratigraphic scale. The second line of research did not give the expected results: inversions turned out to be indistinguishable in terms of the patterns of their operations, which are necessary for using them in stratigraphic studies. Yet, the work done in this line of research resulted in the