Deep-time paleoclimate scientific drilling in Svalbard, the SvalCLIME project

Svalbard offers a nearly continuous Phanerozoic (538.8 million years ago [Ma] to the present) geological succession that records several environmental perturbations of global relevance. Integration of excellent outcrop exposures with subsurface data from fully cored boreholes is a powerful tool to understand how the Earth System evolved in the deep geological past. The SvalCLIME project aims to drill and fully core the Permian to Oligocene interval on Spitsbergen to decipher the deep-time local, regional, and global paleoclimatic evolution recorded in the strata. SvalCLIME comprises two proposals, both currently under consideration by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Programme (ICDP). The first proposal, SvalCLIME-P2P (Permian to Paleogene), is a full drilling proposal that seeks to conduct systematic coring of Svalbard’s nearly continuous Permian to Paleogene (~251–34 Ma) succession. Svalbard hosts a high-fidelity, mid- to high-paleolatitude sedimentary record that will provide essential insights into global climate dynamics across this interval, especially the impact of past hyperthermal events. Drilling a high-resolution paleoclimate archive will allow for the investigation of environmental and biotic responses to large-scale igneous activity and other climate perturbations at local, regional, and global scales. This will help improve our understanding of paleolatitudinal gradients in climatic responses to global warming and how these have varied in magnitude across Earth’s past. The second proposal, SvalCLIME-H2C (Hot to Cold), is to host a workshop to develop a full proposal to collect drill core records from Svalbard across the Eocene–Oligocene Transition to test the hypothesis that the opening of Fram Strait played a major role in the establishment of global thermohaline circulation and cooling of Earth’s climate. In this presentation we present the SvalCLIME proposals, site surveys conducted in April 2025 and ongoing efforts to internationalize the project.