Paleo-climatic and-oceanographic studies are essentially motivated by elementary societal and scientific needs for understanding our planet, in particular the amplitude of natural variability with the purpose of discriminating between natural and human-made change and predicting the effect of anthropogenic impacts on the future global climatic system.

By collecting and compiling quantitative paleoclimatic information of the principal parameters from the Mediterranean region, both on land and in the ocean, in various climate periods:(i) warm climate intervals of the Pleistocene including the Holocene (our current interglacial period) and (ii) times of abrupt climate shift, in particular from cold to warming periods, such as deglaciation (s) and the glacial millennial-scale variations, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of the forcing mechanisms behind the temporal and spatial patterns observed, provide information useful for model improvement and validation and hopefully help to predict how future climate may affect the Mediterranean area.