OK, interesting hypothesis. So, I wondered how it would do with "Why should cultural historians care about ice cores?" which indeed requires gluing together ideas across areas. I asked ChatGPT 5 on Thinking mode:

https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457...

It does a pretty good job summarizing an abstruse, but known, subfield of frontier research. (So, perhaps not doing its own "gluing" of areas....) It clearly lacks "depth", in the sense of deep thinking about the why and how of this. (Many cultural historians might have reasons for deep scepticism of invasion by a bunch of quantitative data nerds, I suspect, and might be able to articulate why quite well.) It's bullet points, not an essay. I tried asking it for a 1000 word essay specifically and got:

https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c3466...

which seems only superficially different - an essay in form, but secretly a bunch of bullet points.

For a comparison, here's a Guardian article that came up when I googled for "cultural historians ice cores":

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms...

It seems to do a good job at explaining why they should, though not in a deep essayistic style.