The initiative calls for global collaboration to rebuild the climate of the past 100 million years

The Times is the title of the International Team project, an acronym for “Time Integrated Matrix for Earth Sciences.” The idea behind it is to launch a global program with the aim of synchronizing age models for geological climate records, which have been particularly important since the last 100 million years. The researchers have now outlined and outlined their motivations and needs for the program.

Geological records from marine drilling allow researchers to better understand how natural climate systems work in time and space. However, obtaining reliable information requires accurate knowledge of the timing of past climate events, highlighted by Dr. Thomas Westerhold.

Currently, many important climate archives are not sufficiently synchronized to ensure that causal relationships between data from different locations. “In particular, the age model of the Paleoclimate Archives has proven to be a bottleneck when it comes to understanding the dynamics of past warm climate stages, which is urgently needed to obtain information on future climate paths. It’s necessary.”

As an interdisciplinary team at Paleocianography, Paleoclime Research and Geochronology, Westerhold and his co-authors synchronize globally consistent and highly accurate dates of all important sedimentary climate archives across geographical regions. They emphasize in their publications that it is important.

One example: recurrence patterns in sediments track changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun, known as the Milankovich cycle. Like metronomes, these fluctuations set the pace of climate change. Using these astronomical cycles, researchers can determine the age of a particular layer on the seabed, thus allowing the archives to be synchronized very accurately.

“It is important to understand the biological and climate processes on Earth that affect evolution, extinction, recovery and resilience at present. However, the most important thing in the last 100 million years is to provide accurate information about this. There is not enough climate proxy data. It is synchronized in time across different regions, making it quite difficult to understand the dynamics of the global climate,” explains Westerhold.

Most of the material and data for this period are available. This is how far forward is the material obtained from international marine and continental drilling programs all around the world.

Synchronizing 100 million years of regional and global climate history is extremely complicated, and the Times Project is extensive. Because timing is everything, the Westerhold team emphasizes, internationally coordinated work must begin calibrating climate records for the past 100 million years.