This award funds ongoing curatorial activities at the WHOI Sea Floor Samples laboratory. This repository provides facilities and services to an international audience of marine scientists, and provides the marine science community with samples for a diversity of research areas ranging from climate history to petrology to tectonics. The repository also provides immediate access to fully documented, described, and digitized core and rock samples, and new material and data are continually added to the collection. In addition to curation and sample distribution, the repository is involved in outreach activities that introduce students and other non-scientists to the collection and to sample acquisition processes.
The staff of the WHOI Sea Floor Samples Lab has been offering access to a carefully archived collection of marine geological samples for 45 years, and remains a reliable source of comprehensively curated sediment cores as well as all types of igneous and metamorphic rocks found on the sea bed. Continuing support from the National Science Foundation enables the lab to provide quality facilities and services to and international audience of marine scientists. Sample distribution numbers are frequently over 10,000 discreet subsamples per year. The lab staff also provides technological advice an hands on equipment to help participating scientists gather sea floor samples of all types. Maintenance of on line access to the meta data of the collection is a major priority so that the community of marine scientists that we serve is constantly updated as to the breadth of the collection. The samples we hold provide the basic framework for studying paleo-environmental factors associated with climate change and many other temporal variations. Sea floor rocks allow researchers to gain a broader understanding of global tectonic processes, and also enable cheomosynthetic and a wide variety of geochemical studies to be undertaken. Our facility encourages the reuse of previously acquired material for many new research projects and assuring that these samples are readily available is the main goal of the staff an its affiliates.
