Hari Sreenivasan:

This is the core repository at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Each of these drawers holds samples taken from the beneath the ocean floor. It's a collection that has taken more than half a century to build, and a treasure trove of scientific data on everything from which plants and animals thrived millions of years ago to how the climate is changing today.

Earlier I spoke with Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist studying climate change and the director of the core repository.