Plio-Pleistocene age-depth model of ODP Hole 122-762B

The advent of rapid-acquired proxy records provides paleoceanographers and paleoclimatologists with a wealth of high-resolution data. These data are a boon for the community, as they enable millennial- or even sub-millennial scale interpretation of past climate and ocean change. Multi-site and multi-proxy research permits regional and global correlations with high precision. Yet, accuracy is sometimes lost sight of, resulting in inaccurate age constraints. To highlight the importance of chronostratigraphic accuracy we examine a recent publication by J.-B. Stuut and co-authors (2019) that presents a chronostratigraphic framework potentially at odds with regional chronostratigraphy by up to 300 kyr in the Pliocene and 600 kyr in the Pleistocene. Using all available chronostratigraphic data, we provide an alternate integrated stratigraphic framework that results in a higher degree of uniformity among regional climate archives and confirms the timing of a major climatic transition in Australia between ~3.55 to 3.3 Ma.