Read the full story at Vox.
Tucked away in the rolling green hills of the New York Palisades, there’s an unusual library: the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository. Instead of shelves, it has more than 50,000 white, 8-foot-long trays. And instead of books, those trays hold chalky whitish half-cylinders of sediment.
“It’s a mud library,” says Nichole Anest, the lab’s curator and self-described “mud librarian.”
These sections of mud, known to scientists as marine sediment cores, are special because they contain Earth’s history, written in the language of minerals and microscopic shells.
Most critically, tubes of mud like these are “the backbone of climate science,” according to Anest. She sends around 4,000 samples from this library to researchers around the world every year. Those samples contain key information that helps scientists piece together the story of the Earth’s climate going back hundreds of thousands of years: how our planet’s changing position in space can change temperatures, and how shifts in greenhouse gasses affect climate.
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