Cores of soft lake sediments

Short cores of soft sediment, used in studying the pollution history of lakes, can be obtained with a plastic tube fitted with a piston and piston wire. If the sediments of deep water are annually laminated (and thus difficult to sample without disturbance) or contain excess gas (which can disrupt the stratigraphy during its escape), a short 'core' can be acquired by producing a frozen crust on a tube filled with dry ice and butanol.
A continuous core of soft lake sediment at least 7 m long can be obtained in a single drive beneath deep water with a hand-driven piston corer. Such a core assures the complete continuity necessary for counting annual laminations or for making close-interval analyses without fear of gaps, and it provides the uniform orientation required for measurements of paleomagnetic directions.