 
Hi, my name is William Ouimet I'm
an associate professor in the program of
geosciences and geography here at the
University of Connecticut.
It's important to have coring
skills because essentially it's
a way to to understand Earth history. The
idea is that with a core
we're actually acquiring a sedimentary
archive and that is a fundamental
process to geology--this idea that there
is layered rocks or layered sediments
and the the sediments changed through
time. I think what happens when you open
the core tube that students tend to be
very surprised that these layers even
exist and so you often get very innocent
questions like what is this, what is
this red I see, what is this
chunk of material that I see and you
look closely at it and you realize that it's a
rock or you realize that it's a piece of
a tree. But, it takes them a little bit of
time to kind of make the connection that
you basically slice down into a
bunch of leaves or wood or sand
layers. So the idea and it's through the
material that were recovering from the
horse barn hill core, we can actually see
and reconstruct 9,000 years ago there
was an oak forest adjacent to the
area and at some point in time that oak
forest burned but near the top of the
core we can see the arrival of Europeans
on the landscape. So you're seeing the
earth change we've seen New England
change. I never get tired of seeing the
results it's always so much fun.
