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H. Acknowledgments, K. , H. Mac, and M. Center-for, Analysis and Synthesis for support of the PlioMIP initiative; HJD and CRR acknowledge support from the USGS Mendenhall Post-doctoral Fellowship Program; MAC and LES acknowledge support from the NASA Climate Modeling Program, and the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center. Financial support was provided by grants to US and AMH from the Natural); DJL and FJB acknowledge NERC grant NE/H006273/1. BLO and NAR recognize NCAR is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and computing resources were provided by the Climate Simulation Laboratory at NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) sponsored by the NSF and other agencies. AMH and AMD acknowledge research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme)/ERC grant agreement no. 278636. AMD acknowledges the UK Natural Environment Research Council for the provision of a Doctoral Training Grant. CS and GL received funding from AWI and Helmholz through the programmes POLMAR, PACES and REKLIM. WLC and AAO acknowledge financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and computing resources at the Earth Simulator Center, JAMSTEC. This research used samples and/or data provided by the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) This is a product of the PRISM Project. Author contributions analyzed the data and DS prepared all illustrations, .U., Q.Y. and Z.Z. reviewed the manuscript and contributed simulation or proxy data, 2007.