Climatic change and geomagnetic field reversals: A statistical correlation

Dates of climatic episodes recorded in deep-sea cores are compared with the dates of palaeomagnetic polarity transitions during the Upper Pliocene period. The chance that the number of observed coincident dates will be a random occurrence can be as low as 3 × 10^?4, and if a suitable simple probability model holds there is apparently a probability of about 0.4 that a climatic event will cause a magnetic field reversal.