In the late 1950s, the first magnetometers adapted to sea surface measurements became available for the scientific community, leading to the discovery of magnetic lineations on the oceanic crust. Since this discovery, first described by Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews in 1963 (the work of Morley and La Rochelle at the same time should also be mentioned), the nature and thickness of the magnetized crust has long been a subject of debate. The depth of the Curie point isotherm for magnetite (580 °C) is on the order of a few hundred meters to tens of kilometers below the seafloor (depending on crustal age) and represents a depth limit for remanent magnetization. Below this isotherm, all rocks from the oceanic crust could give rise to a remanent magnetic anomaly signal. However, several decades of magnetic studies on the oceanic crust showed that magnetization is complex and varies by several orders of magnitude depending on the structure of oceanic crust, types of oceanic rocks, and...
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Carlut, J., Horen, H. (2007). Magnetization, Oceanic Crust. In: Gubbins, D., Herrero-Bervera, E. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4423-6_194
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