In order to characterise Lake Baikal sedimentary responses to global climatic changes that may be recorded in marine sediments, we compared our paleomagnetically dated climate-proxy record from Lake Baikal with benthic and plankontic δ18O curves of ODP Site 983, a site close to ODP Site 984. The neighbouring site was chosen for comparison because although the quality of the ODP Site 984 paleomagnetic record is high, its δ18O records are of lower quality than those of ODP Site 983. Synchronous paleomagnetic variations observed in ODP Sites 983 and 984 sediments (Fig. 10) show that the premise of our age model based on paleomagnetic correlation is identical, if the reference curve used for correlation is from ODP Site 983. We can, therefore, compare climatic records from ODP site 983 and Lake Baikal. The climatic proxy used for Lake Baikal sediment is the HIRM record since it displays the detrital input variations (Peck et al., 1994).