Multimedia Gallery
Equipment used to gather sediment cores
In 2013, a team of researchers set sail aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy to the eastern Beaufort Sea in search of evidence of an ancient flood. The team gathered sediment cores from along the continental slope east of the Mackenzie River. In this image, the piston corer is shown in horizontal position, with the gravity corer hanging vertically ready to be launched. After analyzing the shells of fossil plankton found in the sediment cores, the researchers found the geochemical signal from the flood. Analyses of shells of fossil plankton found in the cores showed a geochemical signal from a flood, some 13,000 years ago. [Research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs (grants OPP 12-04045 and OPP 12-03944).] (Date image taken: 2013; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: May 21, 2019)
Credit: Lloyd Keigwin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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