Zeitschrift für Geographie und Naturkatastrophen
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The ocean bottom deposit collection at the Natural History Museum, London as a tool to investigate the effects of climate change

Epifanio Vaccaro

The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is home to an estimated 80 million items dating back as far as 1753. The NHM is recognized as a world leading centre of natural history collections and research. Many of the collections have great historical as well as scientific value, such as The Ocean Bottom Deposit (OBD) collection. This includes the Sir John Murray, HMS Challenger expedition (1872-76) collections as well as samples from about 40,000 sea bed locations around the world. It is the most comprehensive British collection of seabed samples and cores but also includes approximately 65% from the Atlantic Ocean, 20% from the Pacific Ocean and 15% from the Indian Ocean. The OBD collection is invaluable for studies of the ocean and ocean floor, including research looking at global change, climatic warming, ocean acidification and marine pollution. This historical collection has a large number of calcifying organisms that provide a benchmark for changes in carbonate production in marine ecosystems through time. A project led by museum researchers has compared the calcification capability of today's plankton species with their counterparts from pre-and early-industrial time. This has been based on plankton tows collected during historical expeditions and has provided new insights into anthropogenic climate change. Recent work has also investigated the foraminiferal content of benthic samples from the collection and shown a method for selecting samples that show a late 19th century baseline for the marine environment.