An integrated campaign of drilling around Asia and Australia was conducted from 2013 to 2016 to reconstruct the monsoon climate. The results provide relatively continuous records spanning the last 24 myr. Asia has shown a steady drying since the late Miocene, while Australia has become wetter. The monsoons are affected by the tectonics of Asia and surrounding seas, as well as orbital forcing, resulting in diachronous evolution of continental climate, ocean currents, and the marine biosphere.

BlackGate seeks to MSP drill a transect to study the impact of dramatic hydrologic change in Mediterranean–Black Sea connectivity by recovering the Messinian to Holocene (~ 7 Myr) sedimentary sequence in the North Aegean, Marmara, and Black seas. These archives will reveal hydrographic, biotic, and climatic transitions studied by a broad scientific community spanning the stratigraphic, tectonic, biogeochemical, and microbiological evolution of Earth’s most recent saline and anoxic giant.

The Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE) was cored at Colle di Sogno and Gajum in the Lombardy Basin (northern Italy), where pelagic successions guarantee a continuous record of this paleoenvironmental perturbation. The Sogno and Gajum cores recovered high-quality sediments deposited prior to, during, and after the T-OAE. Ongoing research is devoted to reconstructing the marine ecosystem dynamics and resilience under short- and long-term perturbations analogous to current global changes.

This brief paper reports on a workshop held last September in Shanghai to promote global monsoon research in the paleoclimate community. In the framework of the international ocean drilling program, seven expeditions have been completed within the last years to recover long-term records of the global monsoon, and forty-eight scientists from 12 countries exchanged scientific findings based on the expeditions. The workshop came up with four recommendations for the future ocean drillings.