Coral reefs are the rainforests of the ocean, and many of the world's fish species rely on them as breeding grounds, nurseries, and shelter.
This winter, record ocean warming associated with a major El Niño event is driving widespread coral bleaching, but so far those effects have gone largely undocumented. We need your help to gather data and samples that will help us understand how coral reefs will evolve under continued climate change.
Ocean temperatures have warmed by as much as 8F in the central tropical Pacific Ocean, making this area ground zero for coral bleaching and mortality that is going on right now. In fact, when we visited our research site in November, we saw that up to 90% of the corals were already bleached, some coral species were entirely wiped out.
An urgent mission to the middle of the Pacific
My name is Dr. Kim Cobb, and I'm a climate scientist at Georgia Tech. In March, my collaborator Dr. Julia Baum and I will lead an ambitious field expedition back to Christmas Island, joined by some of the world's experts on coral ecology and climate change. We will make detailed surveys of the island's reefs via SCUBA, collect small samples of tissues from any surviving corals for genetic analysis, and install a number of environmental sensors on the reef to monitor ocean temperature, salinity, and pH.
Your donations will help fund:
flights to Christmas Island ($2,000 each)
food and lodging for the team ($1,000 per person per week)
boat rental for SCUBA dive operations ($400 per day)
Get involved in our historic expedition!
The easiest way to contribute is to help us get the word out.
And, for the first time ever, we are offering two donors the chance to join us on the expedition for one week! Do science and share in the thrill of the expedition's discoveries. Have the adventure of your lifetime in a place very few people will ever visit, but that we have fallen in love with. Interested in learning more? E-mail elnino2016@gatech.edu to arrange a chat with Prof. Kim Cobb. More details here.
The Dream Team
Aside from myself and Julia Baum, we have a number of leading scientists who are lending their considerable expertise to the project, including:
Dr. Ruth Gates (Hawaii Inst. of Marine Biology; coral ecologist and coral genomicist)
Dr. Samantha Stevenson (Univ. of Hawaii; climate and ocean modeling)
Dr. Jessica Carilli (UMass-Boston; coral biogeochemistry)
Dr. Mark Hay (Georgia Tech; coral reef ecologist)
Read more about our science here:
Going "All In" for Science
What Influences coral survival through an extreme bleaching event?
The Big Picture - Corals and climate change
With ocean temperatures reaching new heights decade after decade, we expect that future natural temperature extremes will push reefs into unchartered territory. Of course, evidence that Prof. Cobb has amassed from fossil corals on Christmas Island suggests that climate change may already be fueling an increase in El Niño intensities (see her findings here). It seems likely that the world's reefs will experience acute thermal stress much more often under continued climate change. If so, then this El Niño provides us with a crystal ball of sorts into the future - one that we have the chance to study right now.
We have an extremely unique opportunity this spring - to document what an unprecedented temperature extreme does to an otherwise healthy reef. Which of the corals survived? And why? And how can we harness these lessons to foster greater resilience in future coral reefs?
These are just some of the big questions we'll be attempting to answer with the data and samples that we'll collect during this expedition.
We have the right team, at the right place, at exactly the right time.
All we need is people like you to make it happen.
