Climate: Long range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction

Climate: Long range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction, known as CLIMAP, was a major research project of the 1970s and 80s to produce a map of climate conditions during the Last Glacial Maximum. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the International Decade of Ocean Exploration (1970s) and is based in large part of the collection and analysis of a very large number of sediment cores to create a snapshot of conditions across the oceans. The CLIMAP project also resulted in maps of vegetative zones across the continents and the estimated extent of glaciation at the time. Most CLIMAP results aim to describe the Earth as it was 18 thousand years ago, but there was also an analysis to look at conditions during the previous interglacial—120 thousand years ago (CLIMAP 1981).