Calibration of a Pleistocene Geomagnetic Instability Time Scale (GITS) using 40Ar/39Ar-dated lavas

Advances in measuring paleomagnetic intensity recorded by marine sediments, and 40Ar/39Ar dating of paleomagnetic directional recordings in lava flows, offer a means of calibrating a global magnetostratigraphy for the last 2 m.y. This involves moving beyond the classic geomagnetic polarity time scale (GPTS) and resolving not only the undisputed polarity reversals, but also the many short-lived geomagnetic "events" or cryptochrons thought to signal brief periods of geodynamo instability. Many short events are distinguished as intensity minima in global sediment records (SINT-800; GLOPIS-75) that are dated by astrochronology. Thus, when the degree of stability of the geodynamo is considered, rather than lengths of polarity intervals, an alternative approach to the GPTS is appropriate. We are developing a Geomagnetic Instability Time Scale (GITS) via 40Ar/39Ar dating of transitionally-magnetized lava flows younger than 2 Ma. As an example, the Laschamp event--expressed as a sharp intensity minimum in the GLOPIS-75 sediment stack--was dated by matching O-isotope variations in North Atlantic sediments to those recorded in annually counted layers of the GISP2 ice core. Matching 14C ages from the sediments to specific varves in the ice core shows the paleointensity minimum to span 1500 yr between 41 and 39 ka. 40Ar/39Ar and unspiked K-Ar dating of two basaltic lava flows that record the event at Laschamps, France yield an age of 40.4±1.1 ka (± 2 sigma, analytical uncertainty). Thus, despite systematic uncertainty in the 40K decay constant, both the accuracy and precision of the K-Ar clock can be remarkably good, i.e., better than 2% for the Pleistocene. Intercomparison of several 40Ar/39Ar-dated geomagnetic events, including the Matuyama-Brunhes polarity reversal (776 ± 2 ka), Big Lost event (579 ± 6 ka) and Pringle Falls/Albuquerque event (211 ± 11 ka) implies either that: 1) the astrochronology-based age models used for the SINT-800 paleointensity stack are inaccurate between 150 and 600 ka, or 2) the excursional directions recorded in the dated lava flows do not correlate with global lows in paleointensity.