Timing Is Everything! Initiative calls for increased global collaboration to reconstruct the climate of the past 100 million years

A new global programme has launched, calling for international collaboration to synchronise climate records over the last 100 million years in order to make a significant contribution to the understanding of Earth history, biotic evolution, and particularly, Earth's climate history.

Entitled "TIMES (Time Integrated Matrix for Earth Sciences)" this initiative is an international collaboration of researchers, including Thomas Westerhold and Heiko Pälike from MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen (Germany), and these researchers have now outlined their motivation and necessity for this program in a publication in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology of the American Geophysical Society.

As a multidisciplinary team from palaeoceanography, palaeoclimate research and geochronology, Westerhold and his co-authors emphasize in their publication that it is crucial to synchronize globally consistent and very precise dating for all important sedimentary climate archives across geographical regions

“It is important to now understand the biological and climatic processes on Earth that influence evolution, extinction, recovery and resilience. However, the most important climate proxy data from the past 100 million years, which can provide precise information about this, are not sufficiently synchronized in time across the different regions, which makes it considerably more difficult to understand the Earth's climate dynamics,” explains Westerhold. Most of the material and data for this period is available – because that is how far back the material goes that was obtained in the international ocean and continental drilling programs almost worldwide.

Synchronizing 100 million years of regional and global climate history is very complex, and the TIMES project is extensive. Since timing is everything, Westerhold's team emphasizes, internationally coordinated work must begin now to calibrate the climate records of the past 100 million years so precisely that the Earth's climate history can reliably help shape a safe future for humanity.