This book is the result of a fifteen year research program, involving many institutions and disciplines, designed to summarize the geologic, paleoecologic and oceanographic evidence for global environmental and climatic changes during the last 18,000 years. Knowledge of recent environmental and climatic change is particularly important when assessing current changes wrought by man. This is therefore an important reference work, both for geologists, ecologists and oceanographers, but also those working on global warming.