Climate and the Evolution of the Ocean: The Paleoceanographic Data

The idea of reconstructing the history of oceans and climates in the past using marine sediment cores arrived quite late after the beginnings of oceanography. It was initiated in the twentieth century, well after the first attempts to measure variations in seawater temperature down the water column, which date back to the eighteenth century with the great circumnavigation expeditions. Land geologists were the first to propose paleoceanographic reconstructions from exposed marine series, limiting the collected information to former coastal waters.