Climap Project

Climate, Long-Range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction (Climap) was a significant research project established in 1971 and concluded in 1981. The project coincided with the International Decade of Ocean Exploration (IDOE) and was funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of the IDOE was “to achieve more comprehensive knowledge of ocean characteristics and their changes and more profound understanding of oceanic processes for the purpose of more effective utilization of the ocean and its resources.” In order to achieve this broad objective, a significant cross-section of ocean sediment cores were collected and analyzed to reveal a snapshot of past ocean conditions. The objective of the Climap research project was to determine the oceanic, ice, and atmospheric factors that contributed to the global climatic changes in the past million years. In order to create a climatological map of the Earth during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) of approximately 18,000 years ago, the study data consisted of fossil abundance collected from sea-floor sediment cores.

The original members of the Climap project consisted of researchers from Oregon State University, the Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University, and Brown University. The Climap group later added scientists from Europe, which included Dr. Seibold (Germany), Dr. Dansgaard (Denmark), Dr. Van der Hammen (Netherlands), and Dr. Shackleton and Dr. Lamb (England). Collectively, more than 100 researchers participated in the project.

The focus of the original group was to study climate change that resulted from the most recent cooling period of the LGM in Antarctica, the North Atlantic, and the North Pacific. The researchers sought to reconstruct the sea-surface conditions and temperatures of the planet during the LGM and develop seasonal maps to understand the oceans’ responses to the cooling period.

The scientists were also focused on the origins of ice ages and how the planet responded to them, believing that understanding the processes related to an ice age could help provide insight into predicting future climate changes. Maps of vegetative zones across continents were also developed. The Climap data is stored at the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology at the University of Colorado–Boulder under the direction of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and is operated by the National Climatic Data Center in coordination with the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder. The sediment data files contain 18,000-year-old micropaleontology in the form of faunal counts of diatoms, planktonic foraminifera, coccoliths, radiolaria, stratigraphy, and geochemistry, and inferred sea surface temperatures for 635 ocean sediment cores. The data collected during the project also included samples from the interglacial period, dating back 120,000 years.