Loading dock door to refrigerated storage

At the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, CA, we take most of the sediment cores and samples, collected from the field, straight from the loading dock into a large walk-in refrigerator (about 780 square feet). There, samples are kept at the international core curation standard of 4° C plus or minus 2° C. Each core and sample must be labeled with an identifier and metadata, which follows the material through processing and analysis.