-Pyramid Lake, a salt lake in Nevada, has undergone a 30~ reduction in volume over the past 100 yr due to diversion of river inflow for irrigation of farmland. This has altered the depositional-benthic environment and possibly has changed the overall aquatic environment of Pyramid Lake as indicated by changes in the hydrocarbon and monocarboxylic acid content in a sediment core. In the top 30 c...

Understanding the stability of Antarctic Ice Sheets is a key to understanding past climates and the response of ice-sheets to warming. In this thesis, I examined the middle through upper Miocene marine sedimentological and geochemical record in the Weddell Sea. Sediments were recovered at Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Site 694 located in 4653 m of water in the northern Weddell Sea Abyssal Plain,...

Sediment cores recovered during ODP drilling operations are commonly scanned using a Minolta CM-2002 spectrophotometer to obtain spectral data. Core processing procedures aboard the JOIDES Resolution require that these spectral data be measured on wet cores. However, the effects of changing water content on the spectra of marine sediments is unknown. We examined the effects of changing water co...