Repository News

 

 

Climate scientist Braddock Linsley is back from American Samoa, where he and Stanford colleagues Robert Dunbar and David Mucciarone, collected possibly the oldest continuous Porites coral records. The three coral samples they recovered go back an estimated 550 years; the group collected the corals while scuba diving on a massive, exposed Porites reef off the island of Ta'u. Cores from this colony may help scientists track climate change in the Western Pacific Warm Pool and South Pacific Convergence Zone as far back as the early 1400s, at the start of the Little Ice Age. The corals may also provide context for current changes in climate and ocean currents, allowing scientists to test the hypothesis that rain belts along the equator are becoming more active.

 

Ocean Floor Reveals Past Climate Changes 
Voice of America, January 9, 2012
Maureen Raymo, director of Lamont-Doherty's Core Repository, speaks about the significance of sea floor sediments in studying the environmental impacts of climate change.

 

Nichole Anest has been promoted to curator of Lamont's extensive library of seafloor sediments, replacing Rusty Lotti who retired last year. With a geology degree from Rutgers, Anest came to the Core Repository in 1998 and wrote descriptions of the sediment cores and isolated plankton fossils that could be used to measure past fluctuations in the earth's climate. She was soon running the X-ray machine and other tools to analyze the cores. Over the next decade, she would process, analyze and catalog new cores while keeping all the lab machines running. The Core Repository is now undergoing a major renovation under its first director, paleoclimataologist Maureen Raymo. "The fact that every core potentially holds new insights into the Earth's past still amazes me," said Anest. "The past year has been overwhelming at times with the moving of most of our collection, but when the dust settles, we will have a fabulous new space to study cores as well as state of the art facilities to analyze their secrets."

 

Big changes are underway at the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository. This past summer was spent moving our entire dry core collection from the first floor space in the Core Laboratory building (where they have been for almost 50 years) to the old ODP East Coast Repository space in the basement of the Geoscience Building. The bright new space reunites the dry cores with the wet core collection currently housed in “Reefer 4”. Within a few months, the core sampling operation will also relocate to this new location and currently a major renovation of the laboratory space, funded by LDEO, is underway. Future sampling of all of Lamont’s cores (both wet and dry) will take place in this new and beautiful space.

 

Meanwhile, the renovation of the second floor of the New Core Lab building is in full swing -- it is getting a $9 million facelift funded by NSF. This will transform the second floor into the new Lamont Center for Biogeochemistry. This renovation will provide a dozen new, state-of-the-art labs for both organic and inorganic geochemistry and be home to most of the analytical space for our division. Under a separate NSF award, four new mass spectrometers were purchased this year for measuring stable isotope ratios on carbonates, water, and organic compounds, and Prof. Brad Linsley is the new director of this analytical facility. With all this activity we’ve been on a hiring spree over the last couple of years, and many new faces can be found around the Core Laboratory and Geoscience Buildings.

 

In August, Rusty Lotti, who served as the repository curator for 26 years, retired after 37 years of fabulous service to Lamont. Her dedication to the preservation of the core collection helped make our facility one of the best in the world for archiving and analyzing deep-sea sediments. Repository employee Nichole Anest is serving as Interim Curator and is working closely with the new repository Director, Prof. Maureen Raymo, in planning for the future.

 

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