Funds are provided to generate quantitative elemental data using the newly installed XRF scanner on a suite of cores collected during a MARGINS cruise offshore Papua New Guinea, a focus site for the Source-to-Sink initiative. The characterization of the cores with the XRF logger would be very useful considering the importance to these cores to S2S initiative and the time and funds already invested to collect the giant piston cores. This will allow the PIs and other researchers to better interpret the diverse sources of the sediment to the Gulf of Papua sink would lead to an understanding of how the sources have changed over time. Students will be involved in the analysis of the cores and would contribute to their research. The analyses will also be useful to other workers in the area.
