| Summary: | The ultimate objective of palaeoceanographic and palaeoclimatic research consists of decoding the record of past climatic changes, to explain it, and to make use of this understanding to improve models that predict them. Our efforts to describe past climatic variability throughout the course of the Cenozoic have made great progress over the last few years, mostly due to the efforts of ocean drilling, and we are now in a position to recognise many previously unknown, presumably climate and ocean circulation related "events", particularly in the Oligocene and Eocene . Equally, great strides have been made to explain the longer term evolution of the climatic system within a framework of climate "forcing", predominantly by recognising the role that the changing orbital configuration plays in re-occurring oceanic patterns, and repeated cycles in climate expressions such as sea-level, and past temperatures. For many years now there have been separate efforts to understand the relative importance of high- and low latitude processes that are predicted by changes of the Earth's orbital orientation. During August and September 2004 the Arctic Coring Expedition (IODP 302) recovered the first long record of sediments from near the North Pole. This sedimentary record, although incomplete, now offers the chance to test simple predictions that arise from orbital theory, for example whether the Earth system near the poles exhibits an amplified response to obliquity forcing in general, and whether the nature of this response was different for the Eocene, a presumed "warm-house", and the more recent ice-dominated geological history. We will present the first results from the stratigraphic correlation of high-resolution physical properties records from the Arctic, the implications of biostratigraphically derived age models of these data, as well as the first interpretation of cyclic changes encoded in the sediments and how these relate to possible forcing mechanisms at very high latitudes.
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