Digging in the Lake-bottom Mud

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, geosciences graduate student Courtney Turich may have always wanted to be a research scientist, but you wouldn't know it from her undergraduate studies. She got her Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts.
Life has its interesting turns, and Courtney got interested in the history of the earth's climate and all the plants and animals that have flourished in eastern North America since the last Ice Age. And that is what got her diving to the bottom of a lake near Troy, PA to extract samples of the mud that has been building up there for the last several thousand years.

Click here to watch a video of Courtney Turich and other researchers extracting a sediment core from the bottom of a small lake.