The Limnological Research Center (LRC), founded in 1959, is a unit of the Newton Horace Winchell School of Earth Sciences. The LRC pursues a mission of interdisciplinary research in lakes with the goal of reconstructing continental paleorecords of regional and global environmental change. Lakes are studied as integrated systems to understand biological, ecological, chemical, geological, hydrological and biogeochemical processes and how these signals are recorded in lake sediments. Various techniques are combined to reconstruct past histories of change in aqueous and terrestrial systems including: a) the paleoecology of pollen, diatoms, ostracods, organic matter, and other microfossils, b) comprehensive sedimentological signatures, c) geochemistry and stable isotopes of organic and inorganic compounds, and d) high-resolution time-series chronologies. The over-arching goal behind this research is to reconstruct and understand patterns of past global climate change as archived in a worldwide network of lacustrine settings.

The LRC hosts LacCore, the National Lacustrine Core Facility, which includes a state of the art Core Lab, the National Lacustrine Core Repository, and an extensive array of field systems for collection of lake cores from a variety of lacustrine settings. Within the University of Minnesota, the LRC maintains close ties with the Large Lakes Observatory (LLO) in Duluth and actively interacts and collaborates with the Institute for Rock Magnetism (IRM), the Minnesota Isotope Lab (TIMS and Stable Isotope Labs), the Minnesota Geological Survey, and the Departments of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and Geography.