Refuting Creationism - A Continuous Record Of Climate History In A Peruvian Cave - From 440,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Professor Elizabeth Olson collecting drip waters inside Haugapo cave in the Peruvian Andes

Past and future Milankovitch cycles via VSOP model Graphic shows variations in five orbital elements:

Axial tilt or obliquity (ε).

Eccentricity (e).

Longitude of perihelion (sin(ϖ)).

Precession index (e sin(ϖ)) Precession index and obliquity control insolation at each latitude:

Daily-average insolation at top of atmosphere on summer solstice () at 65° N Ocean sediment and Antarctic ice strata record ancient sea levels and temperatures: Benthic forams (57 widespread locations) Vostok ice core (Antarctica) Vertical gray line shows present (2000 CE)

By Incredio - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

News and Events | Geosciences | Union College

Another awkward chapter in Earth's history has emerged from the darkness of Peruvian caves — and it stretches back some 450,000 years. For young-Earth creationists, that is an inconvenient amount of climate history to squeeze into a universe supposedly created only a few thousand years ago. For scientists, it is an opportunity to investigate how the rainfall systems on which ecosystems and human societies depend respond to a changing planet.

The research, published in Nature was led by Elizabeth Olson, a former postdoctoral researcher at Union who is now at Wesleyan University. The team examined stalagmites from caves in the Peruvian Andes, using their chemical composition to reconstruct the history of the South American summer monsoon. The resulting record has an average resolution of about 50 years, providing an unusually detailed view of changes across several glacial–interglacial cycles.

Stalagmites grow upwards as dripping water deposits minerals on cave floors. As they accumulate, their layers can preserve changes in oxygen-isotope composition that reflect the climatic history of the water reaching the cave. Uranium–thorium dating provides the chronology, while the oxygen isotopes provide evidence of past monsoon behaviour. These are complementary measurements: the researchers are reading a dated chemical archive, not simply assuming that every stalagmite grows at a constant rate.

Location of caves where speleothems were recovered.

Credit:Olson, E.J., et al (2026)

Comparison with Asian cave records reveals that the two monsoon systems generally varied in opposite directions, against a background of Milankovitch forcing — the changes in the distribution of incoming sunlight associated with Earth's orbital and axial cycles. But the relationship was not fixed. The researchers identified ten episodes of unusually synchronous behaviour, including during transitions out of ice ages. Changes in greenhouse gases, ocean temperatures and temperature differences between the hemispheres probably contributed to these departures from the usual pattern.