The Seven Sisters Range near Port Lockroy (64.8 S, 63.5 W) on the Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica. Photo: Professor Emeritus Henry Pollack

Ocean surf at Big Sur, California. The ocean plays a critically important role in global climate change, due to the substantial amounts of heat and carbon that it stores and transports. Photo: Brian Arbic

Graduate student Boris Avdeev doing field research in the Caucasus. Photo: Peter Schön

Graduate student Boris Avdeev doing field research in the Caucasus. Photo: Peter Schön

Moorea, a highly eroded extinct volcano near Tahiti, will eventually sink below the surface of the ocean, but the barrier reef will continue to grow and form a coral atoll. Photo: Ingrid Hendy

Geodynamical modeling by JP Brandenburg and Peter van Keken reveals how the subducting oceanic crust creates geochemical heterogeneity in the Earth's mantle.

Snake River. Photo: Nathan Niemi

A Devonian trilobite, Eldredgeops rana from Paulding County, OH. Extinct marine arthropods, trilobites were among the most successful of all early animals, roaming the oceans for over 270 million years. Collector: D. Thompson Photo: Tom Baumiller

Professor Dan Fisher and postdoc Adam Rountrey excavating the tusk of an 11,000-year-old mammoth, found at Morrison Lake Country Club near Saranac, Michigan.

Graduate student Carli Arendt sampling water and ice at the toe of the Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rockies. Photo: M. Cambiar

Deep-sea coring near the Bahamas onboard the R/V Knorr. Photo: Rindy Ostermann, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

East Lake, off the Rae Lakes Trail, Kings Canyon National Park, California, September 2012. Photo: Todd W. Grant

Sleeping Bear Dune, Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. Lake Michigan has a surface area of 22,400 square miles (58,000 km2), making it the largest lake entirely within one country by area, and fifth largest lake in the world. Photo: Dale Austin

Copper (with cuprite and tenorite coatings), Phoenix Mine, Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan. Copper deposits in northern Michigan were discovered in the 1830's with the help of U-M professor Douglass Houghton. Photo: Deborah Wilson

Banded iron formation consisting largely of hematite and silica from the Negaunee Iron Formation at Jasper Knob near Ishpeming, Michigan. Also shown are pellets consisting of hematite and clay, which are used as blast furnace feed. Photo: Dale Austin