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Sampling the Past

These miniscule sediment samples were collected by Kristen Esser, a guest student from Northeastern University interning in the Coastal Systems Group Lab. Lab members have gathered cores from around the world, including New England, the Bahamas, Florida, and the Marshall Islands. Back in Woods Hole, they painstakingly take sub-samples like these, which are used to detect records of past hurricanes and predict future climate patterns. Esser’s samples from the New England core are so small because the cores she used are rich in organic matter, so less silt emerges from the sieving process required to isolate sediments from the core.(Photo by Gwen Schanker, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)