In Creation Research Society Quarterly 54 (2): 133-148

The 1976 “Pacemaker of the Ice Ages” paper by Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton largely convinced the secular scientific community that Earth’s orbital and rotational motions are affecting climate. The authors performed power spectrum analyses on variables of presumed climatic significance within two deep-sea Indian Ocean sediment cores, analyses that showed dominant spectral peaks at frequencies corresponding to calculated 100-, 41-, and 23-thousand-year astronomical cycles. Previous research showed serious problems with this paper, as it implicitly assumed an age of 700 thousand years for the Brunhes-Matuyama (B-M) magnetic reversal boundary, rather than the currently-accepted age of 780 thousand years. Furthermore, secular scientists have argued for the existence of discontinuities in the cores that were used either directly or indirectly in the analyses, and they have also made modifications to the data sets used in the Pacemaker analysis. When all these changes are taken into account, the Pacemaker analysis provides no convincing support for the currently-accepted version of the Milankovitch hypothesis. In fact, agreement with Milankovitch expectations is worse than the previously published new results obtained using the reconstructed original data sets.

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