Background

This project was initiated in 2004 to address the unique, though under researched, climatic history of the southern continents and oceans.

As a result of their association with ENSO and monsoon generation, and their role in the global thermohaline circulation, the southern oceans are critical to an understanding of global climate change.

With terrestrial palaeoenvironments, an understanding of long-term environmental change on the southern continents is still in its formative stages as proxy records are both spatially diffuse and temporally discontinuous. However, there is an increasing awareness of major inter- and intra-hemispheric disparities in the timing of climatic signals and forcing influences between land and ocean records which underscores the need for an integrated effort to explore the palaeodynamics of southern hemisphere systems.