A Hitchhiker’s Guide to an Ancient Geomagnetic Disruption

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/laschamp-earth-magnetic-climate.html

Source:  By Alanna Mitchell, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: About 42,000 years ago, Earth was beset with oddness. Its magnetic field collapsed. Ice sheets surged across North America, Australasia and the Andes. Wind belts shifted across the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Prolonged drought hit Australia; that continent’s biggest mammals went extinct. Humans took to caves to make ochre-color art. Neanderthals died off for good. Through it all, one giant kauri tree stood tall — until, after nearly two millenniums, it died and fell in a swamp, where the chemical records embedded in its flesh were immaculately preserved. That tree, unearthed a few years ago near Ngawha Springs in northern New Zealand, finally allowed researchers to fit a tight timeline to what before had seemed like an intriguing but only vaguely correlated series of events. What if, the researchers posited, the crash of the magnetic field spawned the climatic changes of that era? ...By comparing tree-ring age data and radioactive carbon concentrations from that kauri tree and three others of similar vintage to recent dating information derived from two stalagmites in the Hulu caves in China, Dr. Turney and his 32 co-authors were able to pinpoint when the tree lived and died. That gave them what they call a “calibration curve,” allowing them to convert radiocarbon dating from that period into calendar years.... 

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