Understanding the mechanisms for rapid climate change in the past

Global warming and rapid climate change are hot topics in today´s newspapers, political debates and dinner table conversations. Fortunately, there is a geological context to these issues that can help us understand what the natural earth systems were like long before there was a discernable human impact on the atmospheres and oceans. While there is no good analog for our climatic future in past record, we will try to understand how past climate changes can help test our understanding of the basic mechanisms at work. I will discuss these issues in the context of my own group´s quest to extract climate information from deep-sea corals and our use of deep submergence tools to find them in the first place.