I found out only recently that this Draw-a-Scientist activity was not something just developed for outreach activities but actually stems from a test developed in 1983 by David Wade Chambers to understand when children started to develop a set image of a stereotypical scientist. Spoiler alert: the results are completely disheartening. Of the thousands of drawings, only 28 featured female scientists. 

In relation to this, a question I frequently get asked by parents and guardians is who inspired me to become a scientist. No matter how many times I get asked this I never feel like I have a good enough answer. Yes, I can stand there and list off names such as Sir David Attenborough and Mary Anning but the truth is that they, amongst many others, including those I am lucky enough to work with and learn from today, have inspired me only as I got older and learnt about them and their work. 

So, who really inspired me as a kid? Well, the truth is that I never grew out of the incessant asking ‘why?’ stage as a child (and I still haven’t!) and as clichéd as it may sound my inspiration was the environment around me which to me was so full of beauty and unanswered (but answerable!) questions.   

I consider myself very lucky that every day I get to wake up, go to work and have the freedom to ask questions and work tirelessly to answer them in the never-ending pursuit of broadening our horizons. I get to meet, work with and learn from incredible people from all around the world and share what we learn with generations both young and old. Advancing our knowledge is one great marathon relay race with each scientist helping take a step or two.  And you can help take a step too. It is never too late to be a scientist. It all starts with a single question. How? Why? What? Where? When? Who? All you need to do is ask a question and have the desire to find the answer. 

Science is for everyone and science is everywhere. 

The post Science is for Everyone appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

I have spent the last two weeks at several different events celebrating the 50^thyear of scientific ocean drilling. I have previously written a very brief overview of the history of scientific ocean drilling which you can read here: http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/oceans/2018/05/23/a-brief-history-of-ocean-drilling-1-3/

Believe it or not but the first attempts to collect sediment from below the seafloor captivated the public in a not too dissimilar way to space exploration. At the time it seemed impossible that you could go through 4000 m of water and then drill through the seafloor and retrieve sediments. And then if we got there who knew what we would find! J. F. Kennedy summarises the significance of this quite nicely and also demonstrates the interest surrounding these first attempts:

“…..a remarkable achievement and an historic landmark in our scientific and engineering progress. The people of the United States can take pride not only in the accomplishment but in the fact they have supported this basic scientific exploration.”

~ J. F. Kennedy

We have made huge advances since and now our drilling attempts are much more successful and carefully targeted.

I have previously neglected to talk about the many accomplishments possible through  scientific ocean drilling and what it has done for you. Inspired greatly by several talks from Dr. Roz Coggon (Southampton) from the last few weeks here is my attempt at summarising the importance of scientific ocean drilling to us all……

The achievements: What has scientific ocean drilling done for you?

After only five decades, scientific ocean drilling has allowed us to prove plate tectonic theory, to reconstruct continental break up and the opening and closing of oceans, to understand mountain building processes, to understand frequency of natural hazards (including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis), to reconstruct the frequency, magnitude and impacts of meteorites, to constrain mass extinction events, understand better the structure of Earth, reconstruct past climates and ice sheet history and sea level, to link the oceans and land and to better understand hydrothermal systems. And this is by no means an exhaustive list!

There are plenty of great resources from IODP here: http://joidesresolution.org

My thank you note to scientific ocean drilling

Simply put, my research would not be possible without both scientific ocean drilling and international collaboration. You can read my full confession here but I get to explore, to discover, to travel time! How many people are lucky enough to say they travel time for a living?! And I am only able to do this because of the collaborative work of scientific ocean drilling to recover long sediment cores. So thanks to all those who have and continue to work together to recover this incredible records of Earth history. More than that though, being involved in the scientific ocean drilling community has opened up many opportunities for me and through these I have been able to travel all around the world and meet, work with and learn from many incredible people, finding role models and friends everywhere I go.

Unfortunately, scientific ocean drilling rarely attracts media attention nowadays, or at least not in the same way as exploring space for example. But it is important to remember we know far less about the seafloor than the surface of the moon and there is more life in the oceans than stars in the universe! And that far beyond the science, scientific ocean drilling demonstrates that the seemingly impossible becomes possible when through international collaboration there is a collective effort to achieve something . So here’s hoping for (at least!) another 50 years of scientific ocean drilling and international collaboration! We have discovered so much already yet there is still so much more to explore and secrets to uncover buried beneath the seafloor!

To finish up and bring this back nicely to the theme of week 4 of the course I want to leave you with one last question to think about….

What story do we want to leave locked up in the sediments?

The oceans are great story tellers and curators of Earth’s history.

By taking a peak below the seafloor we can reconstruct the history of submarine landslides, and volcanic eruptions, the pattern and rate of seafloor spreading, the climate enjoyed by the dinosaurs and the vegetation present when the humans took their very first steps on planet Earth.

Together the science community is piecing together, chapter by chapter, the story of Earth. Hundreds of years from now, scientists will be able to do the same, to piece together the story of our generation from the imprint we leave on the planet which will get locked up in sediments accumulating on the seafloor.

And so, again, the question I want to ask is…..

What story do you want to leave behind for future scientists to find?

The post Happy 50th Birthday Scientific Ocean Drilling! appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

This week in the MOOC is all about looking forward; how we can work together to protect our oceans. Over my next three blog posts I am going to encourage you to think about the past to help us think about the future. Disclaimer: I am a palaeoceanographer (read my confession here) and I spend much of my getting lost in the past to better understand the future.

First up: a brief history of ocean drilling.

Back in January I was fortune enough to be out on the RRS Discovery in the South Georgia basin (read our cruise blog here) as part of a team of scientists gathering geophysical data and sediment cores from this region to understand when and how the Drakes Passage opened and the implications for this on the inception of Antarctic glaciation. However, there is a long history to ocean exploration through scientific drilling which (as with all great science!) is rooted in truly collaborative scientific research…..

Over geologic time, sediments slowly accumulate on the seafloor. These sediments are comprised of differing components of aeolian dust, clays, sands and microscopic fossils (both calcareous e.g. foraminifera and coccolithophores, and siliceous e.g. radiolarian diatoms). In the 1940s scientists discovered how to routinely recover long continuous sections of these sediments from the seafloor by essentially having a long metal hollow cylinder with a large weight at the top drop from the ship into the seafloor (piston coring).

As ship science developed and scientific interest in the stories buried beneath the seafloor increased the US National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a project known as Project MoHole in the 1960s, which aimed to drill straight through the ocean floor, through the Mohorovicic discontinuity (marking the boundary between the oceanic crust and mantle). Needless to say, they never got there!…..or more correctly, we have not got there yet! Read about current progress on drilling to the MoHo here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34967750

What they did recover during Project MoHole was a succession of sedimentary sequences from below the seafloor and a realisation of the scientific value of these sediments. For the first time, we had the opportunity to reconstruct the history of Earth at unprecedented resolution and continuity.

From this was born the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) using the Glomar Challenger. Driving further advancements of ocean drilling and recovering sedimentary records from all around the world, DSDP expeditions recovered valuable sediments that scientists are still working on today.

Next up came the Joides Resolution (JR) and the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) which continued on from the work of DSDP with an international effort to increase ocean exploration and discovery through the recovery of sediments and rocks from below the seafloor.  This international effort managed to embark on 110 expeditions, covering all the world’s oceans. Through this not only did we gain an ever increasing understanding of Earth processes past, present and future, but a deeper understanding of the best approaches to ocean drilling and how to maximise use of the material recovered.

Again, building on from this, the international community launched the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), adding further drill ships and machine-specific platforms (an example of a recent MSP expedition: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-35953976/drillers-to-target-chicxulub-crater) to target more sites around the oceans. These expeditions are years, often decades in the planning. The scientific findings from the cruise I participated on this year contribute towards efforts to get the JR back to this region to recover even longer sedimentary sequences than we did on board the RRS Discovery.

This work is still ongoing today and we continue to recover more ocean sediments, discover more things about the past, and gain an understanding of how to best move forward in the future.  In addition to IODP, most research vessels have the capacity to recover these sedimentary snapshots of Earth history. Excitingly, the new RRS Sir David Attenborough is having a new giant piston coring device installed that will routinely recover 40m cores with a 80% recovery rate and in addition to the other UK research vessels continue to provide value insights to the oceans of the past.

Together the science community is piecing together, chapter by chapter, the story of Earth. Hundreds of years from now, scientists will be able to do the same, to piece together the story of our generation from the imprint we leave on the planet. The question is: what story do we want to leave behind……

The post A brief history of ocean drilling (1/3) appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Why do we care about the climate and deep-water evolution that far back in Earth’s history?
At the beginning of the Paleogene the Earth was a very different and much warmer place. The continents had a slightly different configuration, the ocean current system was different and arguably most notably there was no ice at the poles. However, around 34 million years ago across an interval known as the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (EOT) the Earth rapidly transitioned from a ‘greenhouse’ state to the ‘icehouse’ climate we have today, marked by the growth of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The EOT represents one of the most pivotal tipping points in the development of the modern climate system. Understanding how, why and when the Antarctic ice sheet developed for the first time and how the Earth system responded both in a greenhouse climate and during the early icehouse is crucial if we are to better understand and predict how the climate is changing today and the implications of a melting Antarctic ice sheet for the wider climate system.

Why is it important to investigate deep-water evolution in the Southwest Atlantic?
Model reconstructions show that declining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels throughout the Eocene drove the cooling trend but deep-water evolution also played an important role through heat transport and the thermal isolation of Antarctic, collectively allowing the development and established of the Antarctic ice sheet. The development of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) was very important in all this and could only happen when gateways opened in the Southern Ocean. One such gateway was the Tasman gateway but we know comparatively much less about the opening and deepening of the Drake Passage. In the present-day, the Drake Passage is a very important oceanographic region connecting the Pacific and Atlantic ocean basins. This communication of both surface and deep-water between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans via the Drake Passage plays a crucial role in the global overturning circulation. Investigating when the ACC started and the Drake Passage opened to help facilitate global transport of heat, salt and nutrients, will have important implications for our understanding of the inception of Antarctic glaciation and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) which is a fundamental component of the modern climate system.

How do we investigate this at sea?
The main aims of our cruise with regards to data collection was to collect a suite of geophysical data to image the seafloor and look at changes in sedimentation (which relate to the inception and strength of ocean currents) and find areas where we could safely recover long sediment cores. You can read more about the geophysical data collection here: https://seafaringscientists.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/marine-geophysics-at-work/
To supplement the geophysical data we collected marine sediment cores to (i) help us date the seismic lines (ii) to allow us to generate downcore palaeoclimate proxy records.The retrieved sediment cores will be used by many scientists over the coming years to piece together a picture of what the southwest Atlantic was like millions of years ago.

To hear about what we got up to day-to-day on the cruise and how science at sea works check out our cruise blog.

For many of the PhD students aboard it was our first research cruise experience. Before setting sail some of us answered three simple questions to capture how we were feeling about the cruise:

Keep an eye out on @pip_penguin (twitter) and/or www.seafaringscientists.wordpress.com to see us answer the same questions post-cruise and follow what happens now we are back in Southampton with the data and samples we collected while at sea.

The post Exploring the southwest Atlantic – RRS Discovery cruise DY087 appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Hi, I’m Libby, a first year PhD student at NOC studying climates of the past, otherwise known as paleoclimates (paleo just meaning “very, very old” – and in this case, having nothing to do with the unprocessed, whole-food diet).

You can’t escape the media coverage and debate around the subject of climate change. You may, or may not be, sick of hearing about it but it is an important thing to consider, especially when it could have far-reaching consequences to our planet and the things that live on it. After all it is the only planet we have – for the foreseeable future anyway – and we should probably be nice to this hospitable lump of rock flying through the galaxy.

The famous geologist Charles Lyell (OK, OK maybe just famous in geological circles!) popularised the saying “the present is the key to the past”. That basically means that any process that happens today most likely happened during our geological past, so the study of what happened millions of years ago can ultimately help us understand what is going on today, and by extension, what may happen in the future.  Humans have only been on this planet for 0.0000043% of the Earth’s history, so we have a pretty large history book to be looking back on.

A particular aspect of environmental change that interests me is the similarities between the time that we are living through now and some of the infamous mass extinctions that have occurred in the past, where whole species have been wiped out in a geological blink of an eye. In the case of the biggest recorded mass extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary (252 million years ago), up to 96% of marine species died. As well as ‘mass extinctions’ these events are sometimes appropriately called ‘mass mortality’ events, and they represent a major overhaul of the types of flora and fauna – plants and animals – that lived on our planet.

Throughout geological history there has always been an overturning of species, where certain species die out and others take over (also known as extinction and origination), with new species often exploiting the ecological niches extinct species leave behind. However, these mass extinction events document extinction levels significantly, and catastrophically, above background levels. Perhaps chillingly for us humans living in a rapidly warming world today, these mass extinction events have all been associated with rapid climate change.

During many warming phases in Earth’s history an oceanic phenomenon has occurred whereby much of the ocean becomes anoxic – essentially devoid of dissolved oxygen for creatures to respire. This is thought to be a major contributor to the demise of marine species. Extreme anoxic events have been identified in Earth’s history, and given the title Oceanic Anoxic Events (OAEs). These are shown on the image below, where the thick arrows represent the main OAEs and the thinner arrows show other significant times of anoxia.

The cause of anoxia is debated but it is generally thought to be significantly enhanced during warm climates when oceanic currents can become sluggish and stratified, and oxygenated water and nutrients are less likely to be mixed throughout the ocean. It can also be exacerbated by particularly high levels of productivity in the surface waters of the ocean, as vast quantities of oxygen are used up in the waters below when these organisms die and decompose.

You can see from the figures here that low oxygen levels (i.e. anoxia) are associated with all but one of the major mass extinctions. How important then is anoxia as a ‘kill-mechanism’ in mass extinctions? Why do some major OAEs only have a minor drop in species diversity, whereas smaller OAEs correspond to major mass extinctions? These are questions that I hope to consider in the course of my research by studying core samples of sediments deposited in the oceans millions of years ago. I’ll be using geochemistry, sedimentology and paleoecology to investigate the productivity levels and chemical changes in the oceans during anoxic events, and how this relates to a changing climate.

As much as I enjoy studying rocks for the sake of figuring out what happened in the past, this work on anoxia also has implications for studies of the modern environment.  As our climate warms today, scientists have documented many other changes across the world that bear stark similarities to what geoscientists have seen as being precursors to OAEs. These include the changes in the isotope signature of carbon dioxide (a geochemical technique we use to track changes in the carbon cycle), an increase in wind-driven upwelling, increases in monsoonal rainfall and the expansion of oxygen minimum zones across the globe. These changes have only been documented in the past 200 years or so, and so we do not have the thousands of years of data we often have in the rock record – but they are worrying trends that shouldn’t be ignored.

The post Guest Post: Libby Robinson – Climates of the past…what can they tell us about our future? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

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These are the sorts of questions we have been having to try and answer in preparation for a cruise to the South Georgia basin in January. Leaving from Punta Arenas, the RRS Discovery will be our home for 6-weeks while we go explore the South Georgia basin collecting seismic data and taking a few piston cores along the way.

Here is a video about life on the Discovery!

A couple weeks ago we had to pack up all the lab equipment we will need for the cruise to ship it over to Chile where will we meet it at the very beginning of January and move it onto the ship. We have spent days and days packing and repacking the boxes to make sure we have everything we need from microscopes to rubber gloves, from glass vials to more kinds of tape than I realised existed! Everything that we may (or may not need) for the cruise we have had to pack in boxes and now just hope that we haven’t forgotten anything!

And anything can happen when we try to do science at sea right! Possibility number 1: we don’t recover any sediment. Possibility number 2: we recover more sediment than we could possibly have ever hoped for! Possibility number 3: we all get too sea sick to even tell you whether we recovered any sediment or not. I am sincerely hoping for possibility number 2 (or more realistically something sitting perfectly between numbers 1 and 2!).

This has also reinforced just how lucky we are on land to have access to full stocked labs! And next day lab supply deliveries! It also makes you realise just how many everyday objects we re-purpose for the labs.

Ok so maybe not an everyday item but one unusual example is swimming woggles (or noodles for any Americans out there). Yes, we have taken an entire box of swimming woggles. And provided much entertainment for many around NOC when we managed to lose them in the building and had to spend a day walking round asking people if they had seen our bright blue woggles! Before you ask, this isn’t so us scientists can take a nice leisurely swim but in fact that woggles if sliced in half match the shape of the core liners really well (for core liners imagine super strong drain pipe) meaning we can cut up the foam woggles to fill any gaps in the core or after we have taken samples to keep the ‘mud’ in place.

Along with packing the lab kit we also had to ship off some of our personal safety kit:

Hard hat – check!

Steel-toed capped boots – check!

High vis vest – check!

Boiler suits – check!

Full high vis waterproofs – check!

……this all makes for a highly fashionable and attractive outfit! Jokes aside, this kit is really important to make sure we are safe when working out on deck. We have lots of other PPE kit to take but these big bulky items we have shipped over to Chile….we would probably get strange looks at the airport if a whole team of scientists turned up kitted out in full high-vis with hard hats and big boots on!

Next up is making sure we have all the certificates we need to board the ship:

Sea survival – check!

Medical – booked!

Vaccinations – booked!

Marine mammal observation training – booked!

What is left to do? Too much! Book flights! Work out what else I need to take and pack my personal luggage, make sure all my land-based lab work is at a stage where it can be left for two  months, double check our lists of lists to make sure we haven’t forgotten anything and cross our fingers that all our lab kit arrives in Chile before we have to leave port!!

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Hello everyone! I am Anieke, and I work as a Research Fellow at the National Oceanography Centre. Originally from The Netherlands, I moved to Southampton four years ago to do a PhD. I successfully defended my thesis last month, and I now work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to study evolution using fossil plankton as unlikely, yet crucial study organisms.

Evolution is a fascinating process. Through continuous adaptation life on Earth manages to keep up with an eternally changing environment, producing a massive variety of species able to deal with almost anything. One of my favourite examples of just what is possible starts with a small dog-like mammal called Pakicetus. This 50-million-year-old artiodactyl is thought to have spent a fair amount of its time in shallow water, hunting fish. This strategy proved so successful that its ancestors gradually developed bodies exclusively adapted for swimming, with fins replacing front legs, elongated tails and nostrils at the top of their skull. Today, their closest living relatives continue to roam the world’s oceans, and include the largest animals that ever existed.

A big problem with studying the processes responsible for these drastic evolutionary changes comes from the available fossil record. Fossils of mammals, dinosaurs and other vertebrates are so rare that we are lucky to get one or two complete specimens per species, and many species are probably never found at all. This makes it nearly impossible to study the driving processes of evolution. Very little is known about the processes responsible for the selection specific traits, the speed of evolutionary change, and the relative importance of competition and climate.

That’s where the plankton comes in. During my PhD project, I studied a group of single-celled zooplankton called foraminifera. These sand grain-sized creatures live in the upper 300 meters of the ocean and build tiny calcite shells to protect their cell. When they die, these shells sink to the sea floor. There are so many of them that as much as a tea spoon full of ocean sediment contains about a thousand fossil shells. Add that to the fact that foraminifera shells have rained down on the sea floor continuously over the past 100 million years, and we have one of the most complete fossil records on the planet.

Now imagine you are studying the evolution of foraminifera. You take one sample from your sediment core every thousand years, over several million years. Then, looking down a microscope at all the fossil foraminifera shells in each sample you can slowly see species starting to change. Some get smaller, some get bigger, some change shape. And gradually, you see new forms emerging.

By measuring every single individual, we have been able to find many previously unknown evolutionary patterns. For example, several independent studies from Cardiff, Stockholm and the US have shown that the speed of evolutionary processes varies: times with hardly any action are followed by intervals of gradual or even rapid change. It was also shown that both climate and competition between species strongly influence evolution, but in different ways: extinctions are mainly caused by climate change, whereas the origination of new species depends mostly on factors such as competition and predation.

Of course, many questions still remain. We don’t know how well these single-celled creatures represent the evolution of more complex plants and animals. However, the processes causing mutations in DNA, which are the basis for natural selection to act on, are likely similar across all living things. Even though we might never know exactly how dinosaurs grew feathers, or why blue whales got so big, we do understand more about the underlying evolutionary processes. And eventually, this will lead us to a better understanding of the processes shaping life on Earth.

The post Guest Post: Dr Anieke Brombacher – Evolution and the fossil record: What plankton can tell us? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Most days start with reading and emails. There is never enough time to read and always far too much literature to get through so I always try and get in early to at least read a few papers before my day really gets going.

My research project is very lab-intensive (which is great!) and so I essentially live in the labs. We are very fortunate at NOCS to have so many fantastic purpose-built lab facilities to use. First lab tasks of the day normally involve checking samples that have been drying in the oven overnight and helping masters project students. Training and helping supervise masters project students is a key part of my day; in a similar way to this MOOC it is great to get to share the topic you are intensively researching and passionate about with other people. We also have lots of student workers who help out in the labs over the summer (and keep me company during long days on the microscope!) – having so many active research groups, state-of-the-art lab facilities and students in one building is fantastic, it makes for a really rich research community and getting lab experience whilst an undergraduate student here really enriched my own university experience (and helped with the PhD applications!).

At the moment, a significant portion of my days are spent at a microscope picking foraminifera and fossil fish teeth.

So much information about the past oceans and climate are locked up in these tiny tests and teeth. By analysing their geochemistry I hope to reveal what the ocean temperatures, ice volume and ocean currents were like in the past.

After picking the foraminifera, they need to be weighed individually which takes a while and a lot of practice to make sure you don’t lose any!

Then they need to be crushed and cleaned. Trust me when I say this is a lot trickier than it sounds! Also, after you have spent hours and hours picking out the best looking specimens the last thing you want to do to these cute little critters is crush them but it is all in the name of science and good clean data (fingers crossed!)!!

Mud. Mud always features quite prominently in my day. Or more correctly, deep sea sediment.

Most days include some mud washing to rescue the microfossils contained within and some crushing of bulk sediment for various different measurements. Despite spending a lot of time carefully picking out the best foraminifera with a paintbrush, I also spend a fair amount of time dissolving them so I can analyse the terrigenous component of marine sediment.  This includes both dust and material weathered from the continents that makes it way into the oceans by rivers, runoff and wind.

Being part of such a large and diverse active research community at NOCS means most days are broken up by seminars, guest lectures, discussion groups and meetings.

Days are usually finished off in the same way they are started: emails, reading, notes and writing (depending on how well my brain is functioning after a long lab day!). One of the best things about being a PhD student:  despite how repetitive the lab work can be at times (especially with the drive towards producing higher resolution records) very rarely are two days exactly the same and you get to work with people from all over the world whilst doing so.

If you think you would be interested in doing an Ocean and Earth Science degree of any level or related career, don’t be afraid to ask any of the mentors or educators who will all be more than happy to offer some advice, especially as most of us with have taken slightly different paths to where we are today…..the one thing we all have in common though is a passion for learning about and protecting our oceans and environment!

The post A day in the life of a first year palaeoceanography PhD student appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

‘What is a palaeoceanographer?’ – now that is a question I get asked all the time.

As a palaeoceanographer I use marine sediment cores to reconstruct what the oceans and climate system were like in the past. So, I guess I am a time traveller (of sorts!), a chemist, detective, biologist, historian, physicist, oceanographer and a geologist. I am a palaeoceanographer. I get to lose myself in the past, a time when the Earth and oceans were very different to today. A time when the oceans and climate of Earth experienced key tipping points that have ultimately enabled us to evolve and survive on Earth. Pretty cool job right!?

The next question I get asked is always, ‘Why do we need to study that?’ and I will leave it to Einstein to explain why….

“The future is unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future, we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted.” – Albert Einstein

The secrets to how the climate system has developed lie within the sediments deposited on the ocean floor. By studying the past, we can better predict the future.

For the last run of this MOOC I was nearly 5000 miles away from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton, in much warmer Texas exploring the Pacific Ocean around 37 million years ago (told you I was a time traveller of sorts!). Texas A&M University is home to the Gulf Coast Core Repository (GCR), one of the three main IODP/ODP/DSDP core repositories in the world.

These represent almost museums of Earth history in some ways, with GCR storing over 100 km of marine sediment cores from the Pacific Ocean, Southern Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. An incredible team of curators, technicians and staff scientists work at these repositories and I was fortunate enough to spend two months learning from and working with these amazing people at GCR on marine sediment cores from the Pacific Ocean and Southern Ocean.

The cores at GCR are kept in one of four reefers, maintained at 4.4⁰C so you want to make sure you are wearing a nice warm coat when you are on the hunt for cores!

During my time at GCR I was lucky enough to be able to pull out many cores from their collection to look at and I also took lots of samples which I am currently working on
at NOCS.

The main focus of my visit was to collect high resolution x-ray fluorescence (XRF) records using the Avaatech XRF Core Scanner and so many hours during my visit were spent alone with this machine and marine sediment cores.

Apart from saying a huge thank you to everyone at GCR, that’s enough from me til next time, I am off to the lab to travel back 33 million years for the afternoon. Earth has a continental-scale East Antarctic ice sheet now and officially has an ‘icehouse’ climate regime. The ocean currents are starting to behave in a slightly more similar way to the present day too. Hopefully my foraminifera are in the mood for story telling today and will help me piece together a little more of the what the Earth and oceans were like 33 million years ago…..

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