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Digging Into the Ocean’s Past

February 27, 2018

Last September, WHOI paleoceanographer Lloyd Keigwin led an expedition to the Azores in the North Atlantic to study the geologic history of ocean currents. To do that, the scientists and crew aboard the research vessel Neil Armstrong extracted cores of seafloor sediments, which contain evidence of past ocean circulation patterns. The deeper the core, the further back in time the sediments were deposited. From left, cruise photographer Mariko McNamara, U.C. Santa Cruz undergraduate Deborah Leopo, and Columbia University graduate student Kassandra Costa label a core tube before cutting it into sections to store for later analysis. (Photo by Christopher Griner, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)