Core description collected during Oceanographic Survey NextData2013 (12 - 19 September 2013) Project NEXTDATA WP-1.5

The retrieval of series of proxy data on the past climate will serve to acquire a deeper understanding of the climate system and a more accurate prediction of its future development, as a priority task for the scientific community. In particular, the analysis of past climatic data is an essential tool to study the dynamics of the Earth's climatic system under conditions different from the current ones, and irreplaceable to test the validity of medium- and long-term forecasting models. The determination of the influence of anthropogenic impacts on the planet's environment is supported by a clear understanding of the natural ways in which the earth's climate responds to the complex set of external forcing. Therefore, in last decades, many national and international research groups have focused their attention on the study of the climate evolution in late-Quaternary sediments from the Mediterranean area. By virtue of its close relationship with continental masses subject to several climatic processes, the Mediterranean basin allows the scientists to record the climatic evolution both globally and in the Northern Hemisphere. Finally, it is worth noting that shallow sea (continental shelf) areas are natural repositories for the monitoring of short-term climatic changes and of anthropogenic impacts on the marine system. To make available information on climate history and environment yielded by marine sediments, this WP will be devoted to analyse and, where possible, to collect marine sediments cores, especially the ones drilled in shallow sea environments, and to focus on climate dynamics in the Mediterranean over past centuries. During its course, the project will analyse marine sediment cores from the continental shelf environments and from different sectors of the Mediterranean basin. Previous studies have indicated the cited locations as key sites for the identification of major short-term climate fluctuations, due to global and local forces active during the Quaternary and particularly in the past thousand years. In fact, the possibility of enriching the databases referring to this time interval (to date, still limited to the Mediterranean basin) will provide new working hypotheses for the implementation of numerical models which attempt to simulate how the Mediterranean basin, in particular the marine-coastal sector, has reacted to past climate dynamics (Medieval Warm Period / Little Ice Age transition, Little Ice Age, the Industrial Age, and Modern Warming). The cores obtained will be the focus of multidisciplinary studies involving national and international research groups.