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Tapping the ocean

WHOI summer student fellow Zack Bailey (Indiana State University) and cruise volunteer Pradeep Ranasinghage (Kent State University) collect seawater from the Niskin bottles on a CTD rosette, in June 2008. The water was used to rinse and sieve seafloor sediments, in order to collect living bottom-dwelling, single-celled protists called foraminifera. The foraminifera were then cultured in the labs of WHOI scientists Joan Bernhard and Dan McCorkle, to help paleoceanographers use foraminiferal shell composition to document the history of climate-linked changes in ocean chemistry and temperature. (Photo by Alexander Dorsk, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)