In giant refrigerated rooms on the Texas A&M University campus, 180,000 plastic containers tell the history of the ocean, the result of the school's largest research project.

Sections of cylinder-shaped rock drilled from the floor of the world's oceans -- from as far away as Antarctica -- rest at the Gulf Coast Repository in stacks and rows that would total nearly 66 miles if spread out.

A U.S. National Science Foundation grant and individual countries are spending about $500 million over 10 years to fund the project. The bulk of the money goes to the A&M campus, with the rest to a research facility run by Columbia University and a nonprofit consortium of oceanographic institutes based in Washington.

A newly renovated drilling ship is expected to head for Honolulu from Singapore this month to retrieve more cores.

"Our collections are probably the largest source of our knowledge of Earth's climate over the last 150-plus million years," said curator John Firth, who runs the facility with a three-person staff. "When everybody talks about climate change today, it's all talked about in the time frame of a few decades or a century. If you really want to know what the Earth can do by itself over any time frame, this is the data."

Scientists and researchers visit from around the world.

Paleontologists want to study microscopic fossils. Microbiologists examine living microbes. Igneous petrologists glean tidbits about how magma rises through the Earth's mantle.

The repository at Research Park in College Station is one of three permanent archives that house all cores taken by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research program.

The other two facilities are the Bremen Core Repository in Germany and the Kochi Core Center in Japan.

The samples are placed in plastic and shrink-wrapped to keep the water in and the oxygen out. Oxygen can cause chemical reactions, Firth said.

"We decided that food preservation techniques were the way to go," he said. "My dream is to get to a point where our preservation technology would make refrigeration unnecessary."

Firth said the best part about his 12-year career at the repository was meeting scientists from around the world.

"I get to learn about what other people are doing, with earthquakes, with volcanism, everything," said Firth, a paleontologist. "It keeps me very interested."

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