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Mud, shells, and monsoons

Joint Program student Fern Gibbons  scoops thin slices of mud from a long sediment core taken from the sea floor. Rinsing the mud samples through a sieve releases tiny fossil shells of organisms that lived in the ocean, died, and drifted down to the bottom. Gibbons analyzes the shells’ chemistry for clues to the temperature of the ocean when they lived and when monsoons happened in the past—part of ongoing paleoceanographic research at WHOI.
(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)