Investigations of past climate offer a unique opportunity to observe and understand the mechanisms of the climatic system, and in particular the interactions between its different components: atmosphere , ocean , ice and continents.

Paleoclimatologic studies are therefore of crucial importance to enable models to estimate the impact of human activities on future climate in the next decades and centuries. Reconstructions of major past climatic changes, characterization and modeling of involved mechanisms, this is the philosophy which drives paleoclimatic data collection and analyses.

Scientific activities are grouped into two categories:

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- Climatic changes during the Earth's geological history, with the main focus on the last climatic cycles and the interactions between climate and environment. A specific effort is devoted to paleoclimatic reconstructions from ice cores, marine sediments, and continental archives.

This approach attempts to reconstruct the Earth's climatic states, and investigates climate responses to slow changes in radiative balance, and to concomitant rapid instabilities of polar ice sheets and marine oceanic circulation which caused fast climatic changes.

- Climatic changes during the last centuries, a period for which it is possible to obtain climatic records  with a time-resolution better than one year. It allows to place recent climatic changes in the context of the natural climatic variability of the last thousands of years, so that is is possible to investigate the causes of this variability.