The magnetic stripe signatures of the North Atlantic Ocean crust derived from Swarm and Macau Science Satellite-1 observations

The Earth's crust, the outer shell of the Earth, consists of continental crust and oceanic crust. Oceanic crust is created at the mid-oceanic ridge, where it is magnetized in the ambient field of the Earth. As new material is extruded, the crust spreads outward, retaining its magnetization. The reversal of the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field over geologic time leads to a pattern of striped magnetic anomalies. In this study, we carry out a preliminary evaluation on how data from the Macau Science Satellite-1 (MSS-1), which has a low orbital inclination, influences inversion models of the oceanic crustal magnetic field when combined with data from the Swarm mission. For our modeling we use an equivalent source method based on a cubed-sphere grid. Our model captures the broad magnetic structure over the North Atlantic Ocean and demonstrates that the trend of magnetic stripes is consistent with the age frame of the oceanic crust. The amplitude of the radial magnetic field at 450 km the North Atlantic Ocean ranges from –11 nT to +8 nT. The addition of MSS-1 observations to Swarm data generates results consistent with the overall magnetic stripe pattern. The lack of short-wavelength scale structure reveals the limitation of high-altitude satellites in portraying fine features and hence lower-altitude observations would be required to delineate a more detailed crustal signature. It is expected to obtain a finer structure of oceanic magnetic stripes by combining low-altitude CHAMP field data and east−west gradient data derived from MSS-1 in future work.