The grant proposal for a special new gizmo that helps paleoclimatologists do their jobs was approved. But for Larry Peterson, the hard part was just beginning. At 12 feet long and a little over a ton, the device was too big to get through the door of his lab. So Peterson, professor of marine geology and geophysics, hired a contractor to bore a massive hole in his laboratory’s wall.

The mammoth X-ray fluorescence (XRF) core scanner, developed by Dutch scientists and shipped from the Netherlands to Peterson’s lab at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in late August, measures the chemical elements present in deep-ocean sediment cores, allowing researchers to obtain a record of the Earth’s climate history. It provides a high-resolution readout on anything from aluminum to xenon in about an hour—a fraction of the time it took using the old method of physical sampling.

Peterson acquired the machine through a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation Program. It is one of only a handful in the world and one of only two in the United States, according to Peterson. Having used a slightly older version before in Germany, he is one of the first U.S. scientists to publish a paper with data generated from one of the machines.

Peterson, who recently received a $1 million, four-institution NSF grant, is using the XRF scanner to analyze sediment cores he collected from Venezuela’s Cariaco Basin over the past 11 years.