https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-geological-orrery-could-reveal-planetary-dynamics-in-deep-time/

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory comprises about a dozen small buildings nestled among pine trees in the Palisades, 15 miles north of Manhattan. On the second floor of the observatory’s geoscience building, the shelves lining Columbia University paleontologist Paul Olsen’s labyrinthine office sag under the weight of hundreds of books about dinosaurs: The Dinosaur Data Book, The Ultimate Dinosaur, Dinosauri In Italia. Olsen has been studying them since he was a teenager. His first paleontological achievement came while he was still in high school. Almost single-handedly, Olsen convinced the Nixon administration to designate a site where dinosaur footprints had been discovered as a National Natural Landmark.

Now a professor with a shock of white hair and a mustache he strokes absently when considering how to explain a complex point, Olsen leads the way past towering racks of geological samples to a corner of a cavernous walk-in refrigerator. Here, graduate student Sean Kinney unpacks slim cardboard boxes to reveal a collection of stone cylinders, each about three feet long and four inches in diameter. They are delicately layered: some are cadet gray and marbled with white bands, while others are shades of caramel and auburn. These are sediment cores. Drilled from ancient lake beds, each three-foot segment represents about five millennia of Earth’s history. Together with hundreds of others like them, they make up the “Geological Orrery.” Olsen is fond of saying geologists look at the rock record to discover things about the Earth we cannot learn any other way. With the orrery, he uses sedimentary records to reckon the orbital positions of the Earth and other planets more than 200 million years ago. The method is unprecedented: counterintuitively, Olsen digs down to look up.