Abstract

In some ways, the 1973 Shackleton and Opdyke paper is even more important than the Hays et al. Pacemaker paper1 itself, because it was the ‘foundation’ upon which the Pacemaker results rested. It ostensibly showed that climate transitions were occurring at approximately the times expected from the Milankovitch theory. So, it’s not too surprising that three years later the spectral analysis of Hays et al. seemed to confirm the theory

Yet the age of the B-M boundary was revised upward to 780 ka in the early 1990s. This revision calls into question the original results, even if one completely ignores other potential problems in the paper.

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