Data-mining the past environment

Currently, the Modern Analog Technique (MAT) is one of the most used techniques in paleo-oceanography and it is applied for the quantitative reconstruction of environmental conditions of the past. Through the calculation of distances between modern and paleo data, patterns (analogs) are found, and after an interactive analysis, paleoenvironmental features are reconstructed. PaleoAnalogs is a powerful and flexible tool, developed with Java technology, making it a multiplatform tool to be executed in any operating system; the tool can automatically take on the appearance and behavior of whatever operating system it happens to be running under; it is an interactive tool that permits 3D plots helping the analysis of three variables; it includes 8 different types of distance measures; it is designed to carry out the reconstructions using different distance coefficients and for helping in the comparison between different results; and it provides a wizard for making associations (equivalent taxa, additions) of taxonomic categories between the modern data and the fossil data.