Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix did not use the published dates for ocean cores, instead substituting their own dates. The validity of Marcott-Shakun re-dating will be discussed below, but first, to show that the re-dating “matters” (TM-climate science), here is a graph showing reconstructions using alkenones (31 of 73 proxies) in Marcott style, comparing the results with published dates (red) to results with Marcott-Shakun dates (black). As you see, there is a persistent decline in the alkenone reconstruction in the 20th century using published dates, but a 20th century increase using Marcott-Shakun dates. (It is taking all my will power not to make an obvious comment at this point.)
Figure 1. Reconstructions from alkenone proxies in Marcott style. Red- using published dates; black- using Marcott-Shakun dates.
Marcott et al archived an alkenone reconstruction. There are discrepancies between the above emulation and the archived reconstruction, a topic that I’ll return to on another occasion. (I’ve tried diligently to reconcile, but am thus far unable. Perhaps due to some misunderstanding on my part of Marcott methodology, some inconsistency between data as used and data as archived or something else.) However, I do not believe that this matters for the purposes of using my emulation methodology to illustrate the effect of Marcott-Shakun re-dating.
ALkenone Core Re-dating
The table below summarizes Marcott-Shakun redating for all alkenone cores with either published end-date or Marcott end-date being less than 50 BP (AD1900). I’ve also shown the closing temperature of each series (“close”) after the two Marcot re-centering steps (as I understand them).
The final date of the Marcott reconstruction is AD1940 (BP10). Only three cores contributed to the final value of the reconstruction with published dates ( “pubend” less than 10): the MD01-2421 splice, OCE326-GGC30 and M35004-4. Two of these cores have very negative values. Marcot et al re-dated both of these cores so that neither contributed to the closing period: the MD01-2421 splice to a fraction of a year prior to 1940, barely missing eligibility; OCE326-GGC30 is re-dated 191 years earlier – into the 18th century.
Re-populating the closing date are 5 cores with published coretops earlier than AD10, in some cases much earlier. The coretop of MD95-2043, for example, was published as 10th century, but was re-dated by Marcott over 1000 years later to “0 BP”. MD95-2011 and MD-2015 were redated by 510 and 690 years respectively. All five re-dated cores contributing to the AD1940 reconstruction had positive values.
In a follow-up post, I’ll examine the validity of Marcott-Shakun redating. If the relevant specialists had been aware of or consulted on the Marcott-Shakun redating, I’m sure that they would have contested it.
Jean S had observed that the Marcott thesis had already described a re-dating of the cores using CALIB 6.0.1 as follows:
All radiocarbon based ages were recalibrated with CALIB 6.0.1 using INTCAL09 and its protocol (Reimer, 2009) for the site-specific locations and materials. Marine reservoir ages were taken from the originally published manuscripts.
The SI to Marcott et al made an essentially identical statement (pdf, 8):
The majority of our age-control points are based on radiocarbon dates. In order to compare the records appropriately, we recalibrated all radiocarbon dates with Calib 6.0.1 using INTCAL09 and its protocol (1) for the site-specific locations and materials. Any reservoir ages used in the ocean datasets followed the original authors’ suggested values, and were held constant unless otherwise stated in the original publication.
However, the re-dating described above is SUBSEQUENT to the Marcott thesis. (I’ve confirmed this by examining plots of individual proxies on pages 200-201 of the thesis. End dates illustrated in the thesis correspond more or less to published end dates and do not reflect the wholesale redating of the Science article.
I was unable to locate any reference to the wholesale re-dating in the text of Marcott et al 2013. The closest thing to a mention is the following statement in the SI:
Core tops are assumed to be 1950 AD unless otherwise indicated in original publication.
However, something more than this is going on. In some cases, Marcott et al have re-dated core tops indicated as 0 BP in the original publication. (Perhaps with justification, but this is not reported.) In other cases, core tops have been assigned to 0 BP even though different dates have been reported in the original publication. In another important case (of YAD061 significance as I will later discuss), Marcott et al ignored a major dating caveat of the original publication.
Examination of the re-dating of individual cores will give an interesting perspective on the cores themselves – an issue that, in my opinion, ought to have been addressed in technical terms by the authors. More on this in a forthcoming post.
The moral of today’s post for ocean cores. Are you an ocean core that is tired of your current date? Does your current date make you feel too old? Or does it make you feel too young? Try the Marcott-Shakun dating service. Ashley Madison for ocean cores. Confidentiality is guaranteed.