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Standing under a mineral waterfall

June 7, 2009

Jill Van Tongeren (a graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory) stands, for scale, underneath stalactites and stalagmites of the mineral travertine, in Oman. Evelyn Mervine, WHOI Joint Program graduate student, was also there, studying how travertine forms in this geological formation—the Samail Ophiolite, an uplifted ancient ocean crust— to understand the role of this transformation in the global carbon cycle.
(Photo by Evelyn Mervine, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)