The layers of Earth’s crust represent a record of past climates, and those climates were influenced by celestial movements called Milankovitch cycles. Named for Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milankovitch, these cycles are the result of Earth’s gravitational interactions with other planets which influence Earth’s trajectory around the sun, including the shape of its elliptical path (eccentricity), as well as the tilt (obliquity) and wobbling (precession) of the planet’s axis.
Changes to Earth’s orbit affect the planet’s climate, and as Olsen first argued in a 1986 paper in Science, a record of past climates could therefore be used to infer the positions and motions of other planets.