Special Collections
Prof. James D. Hays Radiolaria Collection
The James D. Hays Radiolaria Slide Collection consists of tens of thousands of slides from hundreds of mostly Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory deep-sea sediment cores. The slides, prepared between the late 1960’s and 2012, are primarily from the Antarctic south of 40° latitude, the North Pacific north of 40°, and the equatorial Pacific between 10°N and 10°S. The slides are standard microscope slides with 22x50mm cover slips using Canada Balsam as a mounting medium. Slides prepared prior to 1970 are strewn slides while most of those prepared after that date are randomly settled (Moore, 1973). In all cases the radiolarians were separated from the sediment using a 63 micron screen.
Method of randomly distributing grains for microscopic examination, Moore, T.C.J., Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, Volume 43, p. 904-906, (1973)
Special Note: the James D. Hays radiolaria collection and the Lloyd H. Burckle diatom collection have been transferred to the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. For access to these collections, please contact Dr. David Lazarus.
Vacuum-Sealed Cores
Between 1949 and 1959 almost 200 cores from the Arctic, Mediterranean, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and across the North Atlantic, had quarter rounds vacuum-sealed in glass tubes when they were fresh. Most of these quarter rounds are still wet. The Arctic cores in this collection were taken on ice-islands; drifting ice packs solid enough and large enough for a small coring station. Those from the Mediterranean Sea were used for ostracode, foraminifera and pteropod stratigraphies as well as volcanic ash and paleomagnetism studies. The rest of these cores have been used to study topics as varied as coccoliths, clay mineralogy, volcanic ash, the calcite compensation depth, radiolaria, the Puerto-Rican Trench, the Mid-Ocean Ridge, fracture zones, ocean currents, glacial cycles and seismic refraction and reflection.
A brief list of papers in which these cores are discussed:
Atlantic Deep-Sea Sediment Cores , Ericson, D.B.; Ewing, M.; Wollin, G.; Heezen, B.C., Geol. Soc. Am. Bull., Volume 72, p. 193-286, (1961)
Arctic Ocean Quaternary Microfauna and its Relation to Paleoclimatology , Herman, Y., Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology, Volume 6, p. 251-276, (1969)
Distribution of ostracoda in the Mediterranean, Puri, H.S.; Bonaduce, G.; Gervasio, A.M., Taxonomy, Morphology and Ecology of Recent Ostracoda , p. 356-410, (1969)
Sands of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge , Fox, P. J.; Heezen, B.C., Science, Volume 149, p. 1367-1370, (1965)