URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

Core Knowledge by Dan Kopin

Rebecca Robinson, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island (URI), is an unconventional historian. Robinson studies paleoceanography, the history of ocean systems. Her historical subjects are the grand chemical cycles of carbon and nitrogen — the oceanic-atmospheric pathways on which the chemical substances travel. But her primary sources, a far cry from the neat documents that most historians cite, are pungent sediment cores extracted from the depths of the ocean floor. The sediment cores she studies contain records of past climates, such as fossils of tiny plankton known as diatoms, whose shells are created with seawater. If you can examine the fossils, you can understand the chemical makeup of the ocean at the time that the plankton was living. “What paleoceanography offers you,” Robinson explains, “is a chance to really see how the Earth operates over thousands, or millions, of years.”

Extracting sediment cores

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