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A Matter of Crust

WHOI scientists and students take a break while hiking to see the Ocean Crust Transition exposed in the Swiss and Italian Alps during the 2010 Geodynamics Study Tour. The field trip caps off the annual WHOI Geodynamics Program, a semester of weekly seminars on cutting-edge research on a particular earth sciences topic. In 2010, the program’s focus was on Earth’s crust—the most dynamic and complex geologic system on the planet. Although the crust of a planet is at the surface, it is often our only way to remotely study the geochemistry of planetary interiors.(Photo by Andrew Daly, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)