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 (Fig. F1) 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);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.