Dear all,

On Friday April 14, Dr Mathew Domeier, visiting from Oslo, will give a FEST in Minnaert 2.01 about:

Untangling Ediacaran paleomagnetism to contextualize immense global change

The Ediacaran Period was an interval of significant global transformation, marked by major changes in the biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and possibly the solid Earth. Increasingly detailed temporal records are being acquired from Ediacaran rocks to investigate these changes in time, but we still lack a robust  framework to study them in space. Paleomagnetic data—which are used to quantitatively determine the ancient position of continents—appear unusually complex and often contradictory throughout this period. The nature of these complex data remains elusive and four distinct hypotheses have been forwarded to explain them: 1) the tectonic plates were moving especially fast, 2) many of the paleomagnetic data have been corrupted, 3) the solid Earth was tipping rapidly, or 4) the magnetic field was behaving abnormally. This presentation will probe these multiple working hypotheses, elaborate how they may be further tested and discuss the implications of their possible validation.

Kind regards,

On behalf of the FEST committee,

Rosa de Boer