Visitor Opportunities: Core Repository
Lamont’s Core Repository has collected sediment from the bottom of the ocean since the 1950s. Today, the facility receives funding from the National Science Foundation, and operates as a working museum, containing over 40 miles of sediment cores drawn from over 20,000 locations around the world’s oceans. The cores are described, archived, curated, preserved for posterity, and made available for study to scientists such as geochemists, mineralogists, oceanographers, paleomagnetists, and geophysicists.
Cores are the tubes of sediment pulled from the ocean’s floor. They include everything that enters and settles to the bottom of the ocean: things that wash in from land, are blown in by wind, and fall out of the sky as volcanic ash. They also include the fossil remains of microorganisms that live and die in the ocean. All of that material as it falls to the bottom of the ocean accumulates layer by layer, stratigraphically — with the deepest sediments being the oldest and the sediment collected at the seafloor surface being the youngest. Cores record what went on over the Earth through time.