Directions were formulated at an Australasian Quaternary Association meeting at Cradle Mountain, Australia in December 2004 and cemented at the first international meeting for the project in Mainz, Germany in March 2005. The aims were:
1. to assess the present state of knowledge on the nature and location of land and ocean records covering at least the last 40,000 years and determine and explain regional and temporal trends (in relation to tectonic, atmospheric and oceanographic and human influences), cyclicity (in relation to orbital and ice-volume forcing) and millennial-scale variability (in relation to ENSO, the Indian Ocean dipole, Heinrich events, Bond 'cycles', human impacts etc).
2. to identify critical gaps or areas of uncertainty and encourage and facilitate development of research proposals to fill them, particularly through involvement of the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) and the Continental Drilling Program (CDP).
3. to encourage and facilitate closer collaboration between marine and terrestrial researchers especially in examination of land and marine climate proxies within the same sediment cores.
4. to generate and compile a potentially exciting data set amenable to modelling as a means of better understanding controls over Australian and broader southern hemisphere and global climate change.
5. to provide evidence of changing vegetation and biodiversity directly through pollen and other biotic evidence and indirectly through dust and other inorganic components of sediment cores and to provide a firm base, chronologically and geographically, for other forms of biodiversity assessment.
