This was also sent in by Gary – https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/every-24-million-years-mars-tugs-on-earth-so-hard-it-changes-the-ocean-floor … After a few days William sent in an alternative link – https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/every-2-4-million -years-205045105.html … and what we are told, initially, is that every 2.4 million years the planet Mars tugs on Earth so hard it changes the ocean floor. Geologists, it continues, have found Mars gravitational field pulls the Earth closer to the Sun over cycles lasting millions of years – thereby warming our climate. Hence, we get climate change mentioned – which no doubt helped to get the research paper published.
Geological evidence, they say, goes back 65 million years – all the way back to the K/Pg boundary event which saw the demise of the dinosaurs. Deep sea currents are affected by the cycle – showing up as a waxing and waning in intensity. They are divided by weaker and stronger flows. This is said to connect to phases of stronger solar energy and a warmer climate – but what they were looking at was deep sea sediment layering. They then sought out links between Earth’s orbit and shifts in the sediment record. This resulted in the 2.4 year cycle – a grand cycle to be precise. The warmer cycles appeared to coincide with breaks in the sediment records – as if deep ocean curents were scouring recently laid down sediment and debris. Strong currents are likened to giant whirlpools, and MAY wash out the sea floor – even at the deepest locations. These cycles seem to coincide with gravitational interactions between Earth and Mars as predicted by some astronomers in earlier years. Modelling was involved, as one might expect, but they also made use of satellite data to map the accumulation of sediment on the sea floor. That suggests it was a calculation rather than an exploration of the sea floor. It is also reliant on uniformitarian geochronology.
The same story is at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240312133846.htm … and https://www.iflscience.com/marss-gravity-may-be-strong-enough-to-influence-earths-deep-coean-currents-73342 … and the headline has that word MAY. Here we are told the scientists were wary of leaping to conclusions – but in spite of that they seem to have written up a research paper and sent it to the journal Nature. What we found, they say, is that sediments on the ocean floor had gaps, or hiatus. The relevant sediment stopped building up – or was being washed or shifted away. See the full paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46171-5 … and some attention should be given to how the sediments was studied. These were actually obtained by using data from 370 ocean drilling operations by researchers unconnected with the Nature article.