The Early–Middle Pleistocene Transition: characterization and proposed guide for the defining boundary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mid-Pleistocene transition (MPT, c. 1.2 to 0.5 Ma) records fundamental changes in Earth's climate state, where low-amplitude 41-kyr obliquity-dominated cycles gave way progressively to the high-amplitude, quasiperiodic (c. 100-kyr) fluctuations that characterize the later Pleistocene and Holocene. We use wavelet analysis on the LR04 ! 18 O benthic foraminiferal stack to confirm low-frequency power as early as 1.25-1.20 Ma, determine the persistence of obliquity-dominated cyclicity through and beyond the MPT, and reveal new levels of complexity in climate evolution. Beginning around 900 kyr, successive major glaciations, most notably in the northern hemisphere, profoundly affected the biota and physical environment. The Matuyama-Brunhes palaeomagnetic Chron boundary (c. 773 ka) is close in age to a major glacial event, occurs approximately at the middle of the MPT, and is widely identified in marine and terrestrial deposits. It would serve as the best overall guide for the Early-Middle Pleistocene Subseries/Sub-epoch boundary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".