The journey of sediments from mountaintops to the deep sea is affected by climate change, plate tectonics, and fluctuations in sea level. These sediments form layers called stratigraphy that record Earth history like the pages of a book. However, many pages have been torn from the Earth's book. Join us as we try to reconstruct the storyline of planet Earth.

We need to understand how sediment travels from the "source", that is mountaintops, to the "sink" being the deep sea, and what signatures are left behind for us to read.

The scientific community has created the Source-to-Sink Initiative to address this fundamental Earth science question. Source-to-Sink is a collaborative research effort funded by the National Science Foundation to understand the movement and storage of sediments and dissolved materials called solutes across the Earth's surface, both above and below sea level. This program, called MARGINS will examine diverse environmental processes that impact the habitat where humans live and work.

A team of researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, East Carolina University, The College of William & Mary, Penn State University, The University of Papua New Guinea and several other institutions are trying to understand Earth's history in the wet tropical islands of the southwestern Pacific Ocean. This area contributes between 20 and 25 percent of all the sediment discharged to the world's oceans.

High sediment discharge from the Fly river on the island of New Guinea allows for a more complete story to be recorded from which to study Earth's history because events can be more accurately preserved in the sedimentary record.

This web site will share the experiences of ocean research onboard the R/V Melville off-shore Papua New Guinea aimed at understanding Earth's history. Experience with us the excitement of discovery.