Summary

Description

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Seafloor Samples Laboratory receives funding from the US National Science Foundation and is located in the McLean Laboratory on WHOI's Quissett Campus. The archive facility was established more than thirty years ago by members of the Geology and Geophysics department led by Dr. Dave A. Johnson, but contains material from the earliest days of WHOI's seagoing sampling programs. The extent of the collection is global and the 100's of tons of material currently archived have allowed scientists from diverse disciplines to undertake research on topics as varied as continental drift, climate change, mass extinctions, and the processes that lead to the evolution of chemosynthetic communities. WHOI is a partner in the Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) database. As a partner repository, WHOI sends data and information related to the WHOI sample collection to NCEI for long-term archive, and for discoverability via the IMLGS.