To date, there is an intense discussion among scientists, economists and politicians on the relative importance of natural climate forcing. Key issues regard the interactions between oceans and atmosphere, especially the exchange of CO2 and heat, and the implications of changing oceanic circulation, chemistry, and life. To unravel this complex interaction and to obtain insight into the nature of positive and negative feedback mechanisms, detailed and quantitative information is required about individual control parameters. While direct observations only exist for the last decades, so called “proxy records” that are derived from isotopic, fossil, chemical and physical properties of marine sediments, reach back millions of years. These describe past variations of e.g., global ice volume, sea surface temperature (SST) and salinity, nutrient availability, marine and terrestrial material fluxes, oxygenation and productivity of the oceans. For a sound application of proxies it is essential to obtain insight in the usability and limitations of them. To achieve this, information on the basic processes that control the various proxies is required and it is essential to test, adapt, and further develop the proxies both in analogous as well as non-analogous situations. Expanding the range and reliability of proxy methods is an obvious and important world-wide research topic.

Within our graduate college we develop, test, adapt and further improve individual proxies by applying a so called “multi-proxy” approach. By combining new innovative methods with more conventional techniques and by bringing methodologies used in different disciplines together, we aim to achieve an optimal validation and a high level of accuracy of the individual proxies. The ongoing research activities mainly concentrate on proxies that provide information about palaeotemperature and palaeoproductivity in upper water masses as well as intermediate and bottom water properties that are important in relationship with diagenetic overprint such as bottom water oxygen content and carbonate corrosiveness. Studies focus on periods and/or regions that are characterised by extreme climates and/or environments and times of major abrupt climate change and where possible similar datasets are being studied by different disciplines. Apart from developing and testing the proxies in modern environments, studies concentrate on certain time slices, Latest Quaternary glacials and deglaciations, major Neogene glaciation phases and the Late Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Event 3.

During the final phase of EUROPROX program, we would like to maintain and strengthen the coherence of the program structure by committing to an even stronger regional, temporal and thematic focus but by increasing the number of disciplines working on similar datasets. This latter will ensure an even better validation and adaptation of the individual proxies. The planned multi-proxy studies demonstrate innovative proxy applications on sea surface temperature, primary production, early diagenesis processes and marine signals of terrestrial climate