Climate: Long range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction

The CLIMAP project also resulted in maps of vegetative zones across the continents and the estimated extent of glaciation at the time.

CLIMAP has been a cornerstone of paleoclimate research and remains the most used sea surface temperature reconstruction of the global ocean during the last glacial maximum (Yin and Battisti 2001), but it has also been persistently controversial.

To date, no climate model has been able to reproduce the proposed warming in the Pacific (Yin and Battisti 2001), with most preferring a several degree cooling.

This suggests that either climate model design is missing some important unknown factor, or CLIMAP systematically overestimated the temperatures in the tropical oceans during the last glacial, though there is at present no consistent explanation for why or how this should have happened.

Unfortunately cost and difficulty of collecting sediment cores from the open Pacific has limited the availability of samples that might help to confirm or disprove these observations.