New Repository Housing Atlantic Sediment Cores Collected After Hurricane Sandy

BOEM-funded Hurricane Sandy initiative creates a new inventory of potential offshore sediment resources in Federal waters in the Atlantic.

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory welcomed representatives from BOEM and five states and the news media at the opening of the core repository from BOEM’s Atlantic Sand Assessment Project on October 25, 2016. BOEM’s Chief of Strategic Resources Renee Orr (left) thanked curator Nichole Anest (second from right) and Core Repository Director Maureen Raymo (right) for the opportunity to see first-hand the nearly 190 cores collected offshore from Miami to Massachusetts. 

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The cores were collected from the OCS 3-8 miles offshore in water depths of less than 100 ft.  They provide a 'picture in time' of the current sea floor and how the shelf sedimentary environments have changed over the past nearly 20,000 years. The cores provide an unprecedented source of new information for the study of climate change and sea level rise. Samples from the cores are readily available to researchers through Lamont's core repository. 

Kerstin Lehnert and Megan Carter from the Geoinformatics Research Group demonstrated the extensive data bases available to researchers. Geologists from Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia toured the repository, where the temperature is set at 40 degrees Fahrenheit.