Final Report of the Oceanographic Survey NextData201. Project NEXTDATA WP-1.5 : Paleoclimatic Data from Marine Sediments

The retrieval of series of proxy data on the past climate will serve to acquire a deeper understanding of the climate system and a more accurate prediction of its future development, as a priority task for the scientific community. In particular, the analysis of climate data of the past is an essential tool for studying the dynamics of the earth's climatic system in conditions different from present ones, and irreplaceable for testing the validity of medium- and long-term forecasting models. The determination of the influence of anthropogenic impacts on the planet’s environment is predicated on a clear understanding of the natural ways in which the earth's climate responds to the complex set of external forcings. Therefore, in recent decades, many national and international research groups have focused attention on the study of the climate evolution in late-Quaternary sediments from the Mediterranean area. By virtue of its close relationship with continental masses subject to different climatic processes, the Mediterranean basin permits the documentation of climate evolution both globally and in the Northern Hemisphere. Finally, it is worth noting that shallow sea (continental shelf) areas are natural repositories for the monitoring of short-term climate change and anthropogenic impacts on the marine system. To make available information on climate history and environment yielded by marine sediments, this WP will be dedicated to analyzing and, where possible, collecting cores of marine sediments, especially those drilled in shallow sea environments, and focusing on climate dynamics in the Mediterranean over past centuries. During its course, the project will analyse and, where possible, sample marine sediment cores in continental shelf environments and in different sectors of the Mediterranean basin. Previous studies have indicated them as key sites for the identification of major short-term climate fluctuations, due to global and local forces active during the Quaternary and particularly in the past thousand years. In fact, the possibility of enriching the databases referring to this time interval (to date, still limited to the Mediterranean) will provide new working hypotheses for the implementation of numerical models that attempt simulate how the Mediterranean, in particular the marine-coastal sector, has responded to past climate dynamics (Medieval Warm Period / Little Ice Age transition, Little Ice Age, the Industrial Age, and Modern Warming). The cores obtained will be the focus of multidisciplinary studies involving national and international research groups.