The SPECMAP Project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, has produced one standard chronology for oxygen isotope records, although there are others. This high resolution chronology was derived from several isotopic records, the composite curve was then smoothed, filtered and tuned to the known cycles of the astronomical variables. The use of a number of isotopic profiles was designed to eliminate 'noise' errors, that could have been contained within a single isotopic record. Another large research project funded by the US government in the 1970s and 1980s was (CLIMAP), which to a large degree succeeded in its aim of producing a map of the global climate at the Last Glacial Maximum, some 18,000 years ago, with some of the research also directed at the climate some 120,000 years ago, during the last interglacial. The theoretical advances and greatly improved data available by the 1970s enabled a "grand synthesis" to be made, best known from the 1976 paper "Variations in the earth’s orbit: pacemaker of the ice ages" (in "Science"), by J.D. Hays, Shackleton and John Imbrie, which is still very widely accepted today, and covers the MIS timescale and the causal effect of the orbital theory.