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The Microscopic Coliseum A Journey Through Time
Paleoecology in the field.

Coring boat
 The research team prepares to collect sediment cores in the Neuse River, NC in July 1997

 

 Paleoecology is the study of past organisms and the environment in which they lived. In an article for NC Sea Grant's Coastwatch magazine (Autumn 1998), author David Cecelski said that the word paleoecology expresses a common-sense idea: nature remembers. The article discusses the paleoecological study that Dr. Cooper is supervising in the Neuse and Pamlico estuaries of North Carolina.
  If you have ever looked at tree rings, you know something about environmental indicators. The tree "remembers" what happened to it over the years, and unwittingly records that history by its growth patterns. We can see the patterns in the rings, then figure out how old the tree is by counting the rings.
  Careful observation can tell us even more: the spacing and thickness of the rings can indicate conditions like hurricanes, droughts, fires, floods and disease that affected the tree in the past. Count back, and you know when the condition occurred.
Paleoecology can take this tree ring thing to a new dimension: microscopic. No, there are not microscopic tree rings. But if you look with a microscope at mud from the bottom of a lake or estuary, you will find fossil indicators that can tell you the same types of information, and more.
  Sediment is deposited in the bottom of an estuary every year, little by little. Anything that lives, falls, or gets washed into the water and settles to the bottom becomes part of the sediment. Over the years it accumulates, so that the most recent sediments are nearest the surface and older ones further down. By pushing a tube down into the mud, scientists can get a "core" that contains "young" sediment at the top and "old" at the bottom.
  Then they take the core to a lab, and carefully extract it so it can be cut apart, dated and analyzed. It is important to keep track of the exact distance from the top that each sample came from, so you can later re-create history from the different indicators found at different depths in the core.
  Diatoms and pollen are two of the most useful fossils to look for in the sediments, because they tell you information about what the environment was like at the time that they lived and were deposited.

Coring tube
Extracting a core
 Mike, Sunghea, and Gary are collecting a sediment core
 Danny is extracting a core in the lab