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The cruises usually last somewhere between five and six weeks.
Each site that we identify usually has about a three or four day survey...
of just geophysical instrumentation.
We want to get a good picture of what the sea floor looks like...
and what the layers of the sediment look like.
And once we have that image, we identify a place for coring.
And we'll deploy a coring instrument that's...
usually somewhere between 30 and 60 feet.
And then when they get brought back up there’s a number of different things that get done to it.
They’re in whole tubes about 4 inches in diameter...
and then usually on the ships we slice those cores in half and...
are able to look exactly at the sediments in the sample and the sediments themselves.
What I hope to be able to give our students here is partly...
involvement in a realistic research project to learn what it is we are looking at in there.
So it may be an understanding of what the winds were like 55 million years ago.
But I think that the most important thing that I can give them is...
not so much the knowledge of that climate system,
but the confidence to actually be part of a research lab.