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INTRODUCTION

Expeditions 303 and 306 focus on placing late Neogene–Quaternary North Atlantic climate history into a paleointensity-assisted chronology (PAC). 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);
 • 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 export and correlation at a sub-Milankovitch scale.

Expedition 306 will include the installation of a CORK at ODP Site 642 (Vøring Plateau, Norwegian margin) to investigate the feasibility of reconstructing bottom water temperature histories at the decade to centennial timescale by making high-precision temperature-depth measurements. The objectives at Site 642 are summarized in "CORK Installation at ODP Site 642."

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