Uncovering a Buried Past

WHOI senior research assistant Ellen Roosen shows a group of visitors sediment cores from the Seafloor Samples Laboratory. The cores contain physical and chemical clues to the ocean’s past, such as changes in sea level, water temperature, and the frequency of hurricanes. WHOI’s collection contains some 30,000 sediment cores, rocks, and other samples from the seafloor and below, including those collected from the human-occupied submersible Alvin. (Photo by Jayne Doucette, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)