Calculating palaeomagnetic poles for oceanic plates |
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| Authors: | Richard G Gordon Allan Cox |
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| Institution: | Department of Geophysics Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA |
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| Abstract: | b
The information available for determining palaeopoles for oceanic plates includes data of four types: (1) palaeomagnetic measurements of inclinations but not declinations from core samples; (2) palaeopoles determined from magnetic anomalies over seamounts; (3) phase shifts of linear magnetic anomalies; and (4) palaeoequators determined from geological analysis of sediment cores. A method is presented which combines these different kinds of data and their respective confidence limits to yield a best fit pole, a confidence ellipse, estimates of the data importances and goodness of fit parameters. Using this method we calculate the Campanian pole position for the Pacific plate which is shown by a chi-squared test to be a reasonable fit to the data. We conclude that the method should be a useful tool for calculating pole paths for oceanic plates such as the Pacific and Indian plates. |
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