Well, teacher Bob (?) in Woodland Hills (?) (where did you go?) suggested that he would be most interested in scientific controversies and how they are resolved. We have a big one. Grad student Courtney (I keep calling her Sarah because one of the 5 Sarahs did her same job on the ship 3 years ago) and I used seismic reflection data to correlate a 1 Ma horizon to the sea floor. The night before last we used "Big Bertha", a massive gravity corer, to sample it, because we did not want to lose our second and last piston corer. Big Bertha came up with just about 20 cm of hard core, but with deep water well-preserved microfossils that could give a paleo-climate record. Jim Kennett, renowned paleo-oceanographer (I think he invented the science or something), has been looking at the microfossils and is becoming more and more convinced that the sedimentary rocks we cored there are over 2 million years old, maybe 2 1/2, and not 1 million.
Our regional correlations say 1 million. Here are the choices.
1: The global paleontology is wrong (not too likely).
2: Our regional correlations through dense grids of seismic reflection (subsurface acoustic imaging) is wrong.
3: The starting point that we used for our correlations is wrong (Yeats, 1981, 1989). This last seems unlikely because it is based on outcrop near Ventura between 2 dated volcanic ash layers. A proprietary Shell Oil paleontology was used by Yeats to correlate the onshore outcrop to offshore wells. Marc Kamerling and I used velocity information from nearby wells to convert the Yeats picks to two way travel time so we could use the seismic reflection data (which are in time, not depth).

So, Grad students Warren and Greg, along with me, are working hard to process new high-resolution seismic reflection data, so that student Courtney and I can interpret it and see if we are inaccurate. Inaccurate is possible because I did the last part of the correlation the other day in about an hour after working about 14 hours. But, I have a hard time believing it can be 2 million years old or older. We used a geotiff of oil industry paleontology map of the sea floor and dropped Big Bertha right where they took a dart core sample decades ago. For Penny, this we in the middle of middle Pico (a paleontology-based interval). Before the cruise, we thought 1 million years might be within Middle Pico.

Chris