Understanding the nature and pace of climate change in the future requires robust and accurate information on past Earth’s climate changes. Much of what we know about past short-term climate variability stems from marine sediment sequences, whose sedimentary components provide an ever-expanding array of paleoclimatic proxies. The fundamental assumption underlying most paleoceanographic investigations is that the environmental signal encapsulated in marine sedimentary components reflects that of the overlying water column at the time of formation. However, evidence indicates asynchronous synthesis and transport from distal locations for co-deposited sediment constituents. Consequently, fundamental questions arise regarding the fidelity of paleoclimate records. Moreover, the magnitude of such temporal and spatial offsets likely varies in concert with hydrographic – and associated hydrodynamic – changes.