Two Labs Agreed To Split One Core In 2019. Nobody Signed.

COLUMBIA, South Carolina — A 2.4-metre sediment core sits in a chest freezer in a university basement in South Carolina, at minus twenty degrees, logged monthly. It has been there since November 2019.

Two laboratories agreed to split it. Neither has touched it.

What both sides already agree on

The platinum anomaly at the Younger Dryas boundary is real. It has replicated. Nobody in this argument disputes the measurement, and this newspaper has checked that in writing with both principals.

What they dispute is what put it there: an extraterrestrial impact at about 12,800 years before present, or an ordinary terrestrial process — volcanism, or the slow concentration of a background dust signal by a boundary that is itself partly a gap in the record.

That is the most argued question in Pleistocene archaeology, and it has a physical answer. Split one core lengthwise, run both halves blind, tie both to a single agreed age model, and the halves either agree or they do not.

The handshake

On 14 November 2019, at a conference in Bern, two directors who have spent a decade contradicting each other in print agreed to do exactly that.

Both described the conversation to us independently. Neither disputes a word of the other's account, which is the only thing in this file both of them have ever said about the same event.

Dr. Solveig Marek-Abiodun's laboratory would take the platinum and iridium. Prof. Hartmut Csendes-Oyelaran's group would take the shock-metamorphic and magnetic fraction. The age model would be built by a third laboratory that has published against both of them.

On paper it is the best-designed experiment in the field.

Clause 7

This newspaper obtained the draft material transfer agreement and its covering emails, supplied by one party with the other party's written knowledge. Every passage quoted here was put to both principals first.

There are eleven drafts. Three law firms have been instructed. The scientific annex — sampling plan, blinding, analytical order — has not been materially altered since draft two, in March 2020.

Clause 7 has been rewritten nine times.

It covers the residue. Which institution may publish on what remains of the core after the analysis, and which institution indemnifies which for the loss of a sample that the analysis consumes and that cannot be taken again.

There is no villain in the file. It is two research offices doing their jobs correctly, on a thing that exists once.

The freezer

Our correspondent was shown it on 16 June. A commercial chest unit with a padlock and a clipboard on the lid. Eighty-one monthly entries in four different hands. The temperature has never been recorded above minus 18.4.

The core is in six sealed lengths, wrapped, on the bottom shelf, under a box of somebody's 2014 lake sediments.

The technician who keeps the log has worked in that building since 2017. Asked what happens if the freezer fails, she said the alarm goes to her telephone, she lives eleven minutes away, and she has driven in twice.

What this desk takes from it

The argument has run in the literature for nineteen years and has produced, by our count, more than four hundred papers.

The object that would narrow it is 2.4 metres long, is under a box of lake mud, and is waiting on two pages about who gets the leftovers.

Professor Csendes-Oyelaran's reply, printed below, says we have made a careful problem look like a farce, and that the real obstruction is not the lawyers but an age model nobody has agreed. He may be right. We asked both principals, in writing, what result would change their mind. Neither answered, and both were shown that sentence before it printed.