Image

Arbor Day Oceanography

Keelan Murphy (left), a student at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and Mary Lardie, a technician in the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS) facility at WHOI, extracted samples from a section of a beech tree recently. This particular tree stood on the Woods Hole campus for nearly 150 years, but had to be cut down last year after it was found to be infected with bark canker. Murphy and Lardie used samples from individual tree rings to look for the telltale “spike” in radioactive carbon produced by nuclear weapons tests over the years and hope to create a calibration standard for NOSAMS and other, similar facilities. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)