Acquiring High to Ultra-High Resolution Geological Records of Past Climate Change by Scientific Drilling

Scientific drilling on land and sea has played a key role in advancing our knowledge of climate change. It has helped to demonstrate the effects of orbital variations on climate, revealed evidence for extreme warm events in the past and for the timing of Antarctic ice growth, and provided insights into the hydrologic balance of lake systems around the world. Now, with attention increasingly focused on the likely manifestation of future climate change, the challenge to understand past climates at societally relevant, high-resolution timescales has become ever more critical. Sediments and other archives that preserve climate information ontimescales approaching those of instrumental records have much to offer to our understanding of how the climate system works (Fig. 1). These records, ideally with a sub-annual to centennial resolution, provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the global operation of the ocean-continent-atmosphere system on human timescales and to appraise the relative importance of each part of the system