The South Atlantic in the late quaternary: reconstruction of material budgets and current systems: a review.

Abstract

In order to understand current and future patterns of climate variability and change, we need to know how climate varied in the past and which physical forcing mechanisms led to these climatic changes. Direct observations of climate indicators such as temperature and rainfall reach back about 150 years. To extend this observational record, we rely on information from environmental paleoclimatic proxy records that have been extracted from natural archives of past climate variability.