The ocean around Southern Africa is a key location in which to examine connections between the greater Agulhas Current system and past global ocean circulation and climate variability as well as its links to human evolution. Variations in Agulhas warm water transports along the southeast African continental margin foster exchanges of heat and moisture with the atmosphere that influence southern Africa regional rainfall.
Expedition 361 tapped exceptionally intact archives back to the late Miocene in four of the sites. The sedimentological characteristics range from highly terrigenous near the Zambezi (Site U1477) and Limpopo (U1478) Rivers and in the Natal Valley (U1474) to carbonate rich in the northern Mozambique Channel (U1476), the Agulhas Plateau (U1475) and the Cape Basin (U1479). Nannofossils and foraminifers provided well-developed shipboard biostratigraphies that are in accord with paleomagnetic and diatom stratigraphies. All of the studied fossil groups show a mixture of tropical, subtropical convergence, and temperate or subpolar species in the southernmost sites, and changes through time in these assemblages will provide important constraints on the dynamics of the Agulhas system. The records sampled on Expedition 361 hold significant potential to investigate the connections between southern African terrestrial climates and SE Indian Ocean heat budgets, and notably the links to the cultural evolution of early modern humans. The talk will give a background and overview of the expedition and present emerging preliminary results.