Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 303 was designed to sample and study climate records, including the composition and structure of surface or bottom waters and detrital layer stratigraphy indicative of ice sheet instability, at strategic sites that record North Atlantic Pliocene–Quaternary climate. The sites are distributed from the mouth of the Labrador Sea (Eirik Drift and Orphan Knoll) to the central Atlantic in the region of the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone. The sites were chosen on the basis of the importance of the climate or paleoceanographic record, adequate sedimentation rates in the 5–20 cm/k.y. range, and the attributes for a stratigraphic template based on relative geomagnetic paleointensity and oxygen isotope data.

        The focus of Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 303 was to place late Neogene–Quaternary North Atlantic climate history into a paleointensity-assisted chronology (PAC) based on oxygen isotopes and geomagnetic paleointensity. The nine primary drilling locations are known, either from previous Ocean Drilling Program (ODP)/Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) drilling or from conventional piston cores, to have the following attributes:

•         They contain distinct records of millennial-scale environmental variability (in terms of ice sheet–ocean interactions, deep circulation changes, or sea-surface conditions);
•         They provide the requirements for developing a millennial-scale stratigraphy (through geomagnetic paleointensity, oxygen isotopes, microfossils, and regional environmental patterns); and
•         They document the details of geomagnetic field behavior.

        The ultimate objective is to generate a chronostratigraphic template for North Atlantic climate proxies to allow their correlation at a sub-Milankovitch scale and their export to other parts of the globe.

For more information: http://iodp.tamu.edu/scienceops/expeditions/exp303.html