[Nathan Zachary]

"Pälike and his colleagues went considerably further than that, pulling a sediment core from the depths of the Pacific that stretched back 42 million years. Limiting their analysis to the Oligocene--a glacial time period that lasted between roughly 34 million and 23 million years ago-

The pacific floor is dished in, and the mid atlantic ridge pushes the sea floor up; it slopes from the coastlines down to a point that's deepest between the mid atlantic ridge and the coastlines. Wanna bet that sediment drifts slowly towards the deepest parts of these formations? Using core samples of this stuff as measurements of the earths age is just plain silly.
There is no way to predict how much is slides towards these centers a year or how many events have effected it, the rate at which this sediment is produced, that it was always constant, etc etc. What about so called continental drift?

Surely that moved it around a lot in 42 million years. Not to mention that we'd all be dead or very stoned from breathing all that methane gas released from the Methane Hydrate ice formations. There is no way that this stuff can be used to determine what the weather was at any point in history because of these underterminable variables.

Heiko Pälike had better head back to the guessing board if he wants to get more grant money. Surely he could have come up with something more believable than this. It can't be that hard.

[Robert A Cook PE]

The pacific floor is dished in, and the mid atlantic ridge pushes the sea floor up; it slopes from the coastlines down to a point that's deepest between the mid atlantic ridge and the coastlines. Wanna bet that sediment drifts slowly towards the deepest parts of these formations? Using core samples of this stuff as measurements of the earths age is just plain silly.
There is no way to predict how much is slides towards these centers a year or how many events have effected it, the rate at which this sediment is produced, that it was always constant, etc etc. What about so called continental drift?

Surely that moved it around a lot in 42 million years. Not to mention that we'd all be dead or very stoned from breathing all that methane gas released from the Methane Hydrate ice formations. There is no way that this stuff can be used to determine what the weather was at any point in history because of these underterminable variables.

Heiko Pälike had better head back to the guessing board if he wants to get more grant money. Surely he could have come up with something more believable than this. It can't be that hard.

Sea floor sediments are actually a pretty way to check.

yes, and no - part of what your saying is right, but the conclusion isn't valid.

Sediment (from erosion and whale poop, and dead plankton, and dead fish poop and plants) drops at a pretty steady rate. The characteristics of that dropped sediment change as the climate changes, which helps.

Yes, the thickness of the seafloor sediment layer is greater at the edges (away from the mid-Atlantic rift for example - where it is zero) compared to the thickness where the seafloor drops into a trench. The rift itself is much higher than the general ocean floor though because of the rising magma pushes up the floor locally.

But, at the trench, the sudden drop-off is so great as the ocean floor goes under a continental plate that the actual ocean depth increases significantly. Much more on the west Pacific than west Atlantic however.

But the sea floor sediment itself is very steady: it doesn't slide or displace sideways as the whole crust moves. A glacier, on the other hand is very unstable and does significantly move its accumulated debris around as it goes down the mountain. The glacier though is moving at ten thousand times the rate.