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Blast from the Past

A section of beech tree that stood on the WHOI campus in Woods Hole for nearly 150 years is ready to be sampled by technicians at the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS), a specialized facility that provides carbon-14 analysis to the ocean sciences research community. The tree had to be cut down last year after it was found to be infected with bark canker. NOSAMS technicians are using samples from individual tree rings to look for the telltale “spike” in radioactive carbon produced by nuclear weapons tests over the years in the hope of creating a calibration standard for NOSAMS and other, similar labs. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)