South Andros Island, part of the Bahamian archipelago, is a sandy slice of paradise whose shores conceal buried geological treasures: blue holes. Hiding in the depths of these ethereal submarine sinkholes lay ancient sediment sandwiches whose layers betray the bygone passages of powerful hurricanes.

The isle is often a pitstop for hurricanes heading toward the Gulf of Mexico or North America’s east coast. If these lithic libraries could be accessed, scientists could travel back in time and compare the Atlantic hurricanes of today with the specters of storms past.

With some ad-hoc engineering ingenuity, researchers have extracted several of these towers of sediment from their blue hole homes. As reported earlier this month in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, one