Incidences of nondeposition or erosion at the modern seabed and hiatuses within the pelagic caps of guyots and seamounts are evaluated along with paleotemperature and physiographic information to speculate on the character of late Cenozoic internal tidal waves in the upper Pacific Ocean. Drill-core and seismic reflection data are used to classify sediment at the drill sites as having been accumulating or eroding or not being deposited in the recent geological past. When those classified sites are compared against predictions of a numerical model of the modern internal tidal wave field (Simmons, 2008), the sites accumulating particles over the past few million years are found to be away from beams of the modeled internal tide, while those that have not been accumulating are in internal tide beams. Given the correspondence to the modern internal wave field, we examine whether internal tides can explain ancient hiatuses at the drill sites. For example, late Cenozoic pelagic caps on guyots among the Marshall Islands contain two hiatuses of broadly similar age, but the dates of the first pelagic sediments deposited following each hiatus do not correlate between guyots, suggesting that they originate not from ocean chemical changes, but from physical processes, such as erosion by internal tidal waves. We investigate how changing conditions such as ocean temperature and basin physiography may have affected internal tides through the Cenozoic. Allowing for subsequent rotation or uplift by plate tectonics, ancient submarine ridges among the Solomon, Bonin, and Mariana island chains may have been responsible for some sediment hiatuses at these distant guyot sites.
