tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65227211050622817952024-02-07T04:42:08.588-08:00Coral reef impacts of the 2014/15 El Niño eventKim Cobbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01936841371990199588noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6522721105062281795.post-18787010732434416772014-09-11T22:05:00.000-07:002014-09-12T07:04:11.390-07:00Physical Oceanography in Paradise<div>
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by Sam Stevenson</div>
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As
Kim has described in her earlier posts, our team has a dual mission: at
Christmas Island, to document the impacts of the El Nino event on coral
reef health; and at Palmyra Atoll a bit further north, to look at the
physical changes taking place around the atoll during the course of the
event. Here is a map showing both, with Hawaii included for context:</div>
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The physical-oceanographic (PO) side of the proposal is very
closely related to the work I'm doing under an NSF postdoc fellowship:
modeling how El Nino and La Nina events create changes in the oxygen
isotopic ratio in seawater near tropical Pacific reefs. This is really
important since when you try to reconstruct past climate variability,
you're assuming a relationship between the thing you're measuring (coral
oxygen isotopes) and the thing you want to reconstruct (El Nino/La
Nina). So I'm working on trying to understand that relationship as well
as possible - we started out simply using the new version of an ocean
model we've developed, but when the 2014 El Nino was looking like it
might be 'The Next Big One' it seemed like a great opportunity to get
out in the field and collect some data as well. And even now that the
likely size of the El Nino is smaller, from my perspective it is still a
great opportunity, since we'll just be able to assess what <i>small</i> El Ninos, rather than big ones, do to isotope changes near the reefs.<br />
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The PO project would not have been
possible without Mark Merrifield, who made all the Palmyra logistics
happen and supplied his amazing team of dive technicians to do the
installation of instruments on the reef. We'll be measuring temperature,
salinity, and the speed of currents in several spots around the island.
Then the other set of data we'll be collecting is the isotopic ratio of
oxygen in both rainwater and seawater at Palmyra. Taken together, this
will give us an idea of pretty much everything that can affect isotopes
in seawater near these reefs. </div>
Now, normally the work that I
do takes place on a computer screen, so I was already pretty excited about
going to collect "real" data. And I have to say, if you have to pick a
single place to do fieldwork, Palmyra is a pretty excellent choice!
Unlike Christmas, no one actually lives on Palmyra - it's a wildlife
refuge and the only people there are scientific researchers and support
staff from the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Fish and Wildlife
Service. So it's an extremely pristine environment, and everything is
designed to make the research experience as easy as possible. Of course,
the fact that no one lives there means it's a lot harder to get to than
Christmas... the only flights in and out are on a jet chartered by TNC,
that comes once every week to week and a half (and sometimes not at
all, if you're unlucky with the weather). <br />
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When we were at Palmyra, most of the time the population of the entire atoll was only 15, which
gives things a bit of a "summer camp-like" vibe. You stay in small
cabins, have assigned chores, and eat communally at set times: then
there are scheduled activities every week like "science night", when the
visiting researchers give brief talks on why they're there for the
other scientists and the staff. And because it's such an isolated environment, the snorkeling you can do in your spare time is some of the most incredible I've ever seen:</div>
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(this photo credit goes to <a href="http://www.davidslaterphotography.com/">David Slater</a>, our amazing dive tech/photographer!)</div>
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Our
little expedition achieved its goals without too many issues, aside
from having to revisit a couple of sites during more favorable weather
conditions. We visited five different sites around Palmyra: one each on
the northern, northwestern, western, and southern sites plus one inside
the channel that connects the lagoon inside the atoll to the open ocean. In each location, we installed a specially designed mount which holds a CTD (conductivity/temperature/depth) sensor which measures temperature and salinity, and an ADCP (acoustic Doppler current profiler) to measure current speeds. The whole thing is weighted down by 60 pounds of lead, and looks like this:</div>
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(pic also from Dave Slater, this time with my GoPro)</div>
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The two divers are Carly and Christina, who did all the prep work and testing at UH. They did a fantastic job! They also did the transporting of the CTD and current meters down to the ocean floor by 'lift bags' (yellow bag you see above, it is quite buoyant and helps you deal with carrying lots and lots of lead underwater), and staking everything down into the reef with long metal poles. All the techs will be returning to Palmyra in March to retrieve the instruments and put new ones down, and I am eagerly awaiting all the data that's hopefully being collected as we speak.</div>
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Back on land, we also set up a program to collect samples of rain and seawater at regular intervals, to be analyzed by Kim's lab for their oxygen isotopic composition. I installed a rain collection system prepared by Kim's student Jessica Moerman, right next to the rain gauge that was already in the main camp area:</div>
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Our collector is the one on the left, and the on-site staff were nice enough to agree to empty it every day and collect a sample for us along with recording the amount of rainfall. And being the amazingly nice people that they are, they also agreed to collect samples of seawater every week. This doesn't sound like it would be all that difficult on the face of it, but there aren't exactly very many trails around Palmyra... and the ones that do exist are so overgrown that you don't even recognize them at first. Things just want to grow in the tropics!</div>
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Anyway, the point is that doing seawater sample collection requires that you wade across the reef flats on the north shore of the island to get to breaking waves, which is a bit of a process. </div>
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(see the breakers way off in the distance?)</div>
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But the data that we end up with will be one of the best resources out there for understanding exactly what an El Nino event does to seawater isotopic composition - especially when combined with the information returned from the moored instruments. Now I just need to figure out how to thank the Nature Conservancy!</div>
Kim Cobbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01936841371990199588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6522721105062281795.post-24455708085056177722014-09-06T00:04:00.002-07:002014-09-06T09:42:51.680-07:00Agony, ecstasy, and ironyby Kim Cobb<br />
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You cannot make this stuff up.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pam and I arrived the day before yesterday to find Julia
Baum’s team facing more than the usual challenges on Christmas Island. They had been struggling for the past week to
get tanks filled for their SCUBA-intensive research. The Baum team arrived on
Christmas to learn that the main compressor on the island had failed and they
were using a backup unit. Julia and I have been diving at Christmas using tanks
from Dive Kiribas – ostensibly the only dive operation on the island - for over
a dozen expeditions combined. Shifting to the backup unit brought two
problems:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1) it stopped running on
occasion, requiring several hours of repair, and 2) when it was working, the
resulting tanks had toxic levels of carbon monoxide. Thankfully they were able
to cherry-pick a few tanks that were under internationally-accepted limits of
10ppm, as they had brought a CO monitor. But the poor volume and quality of
tanks had left both our field programs in a precarious state. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ-K4alVLfDkesMDg47IYV38tJicSyPdog_GD0Y9hVPNMRPPD6ncH14jDHhx_hlh_b8k99VKWNJtI5ozKOXuuAM4AzM_MiZA9sjFV9SLd81bqDVy7EHAsM1XEKhTgw6rHBW3zymMhA0sU/s1600/compressor_comp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ-K4alVLfDkesMDg47IYV38tJicSyPdog_GD0Y9hVPNMRPPD6ncH14jDHhx_hlh_b8k99VKWNJtI5ozKOXuuAM4AzM_MiZA9sjFV9SLd81bqDVy7EHAsM1XEKhTgw6rHBW3zymMhA0sU/s1600/compressor_comp.jpg" height="400" width="190" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Compressor roulette. Are<br />
you feeling lucky?</td></tr>
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With creepy prescience, Julia and I had shipped a very
expensive field-ready compressor down for this expedition, because we didn’t
want to rely on the aging compressor at Dive Kiribati (DK). Indeed, it had actually
arrived on the island the very day that the DK compressor failed for good! We
patted ourselves on the back and the Baum team fired it up and happily filled
their tanks for two days before it started spewing black smoke. By Day 3 it was
unable to fill a tank, so the Baum team was back to an ever-dwindling supply of tanks with acceptable CO levels. Our plane touched down on Day 4 of this fiasco:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the mechanic was struggling to resurrect the
DK compressor and Julia’s stalwart student, Kieran Cox, had been wrestling with
the new compressor all day to diagnose and fix the problem.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The very minute I alighted at DK, at 5pm, I was whisked to
the shed to discuss the decision of the moment:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>whether to use epoxy to glue the engine back together after a screw had
sheared off during repair. After much hemming and hawing, and with a huge amount
of optimism, we decided we had no choice but to proceed. [Twitter followers
will note that this is where I used the single malt scotch I had brought to
wipe lubricant off the metal sealing surfaces prior to epoxy applic<span style="background-color: white;">ation (see photo)</span>.] Pam and I spent the evening taking<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAzxSCYxz92Fo8pcQ4psj-SggAnfyncgmI2vtf1sw_M5q2WtAgFpSnZuD5RfJtaS4yIRRfTNJMcZbLkL1AE9TQ6GKiMO9JI9ciYxREpJNwUr5bFYYVLEW8F_wSfmpzA0VqNxqJ4k4afGI/s1600/kieran_scotch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAzxSCYxz92Fo8pcQ4psj-SggAnfyncgmI2vtf1sw_M5q2WtAgFpSnZuD5RfJtaS4yIRRfTNJMcZbLkL1AE9TQ6GKiMO9JI9ciYxREpJNwUr5bFYYVLEW8F_wSfmpzA0VqNxqJ4k4afGI/s1600/kieran_scotch.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kieran using a pipette to administer <br />
scotch to the compressor.</td></tr>
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1-hr shifts holding the epoxied components of our
compressor together while it set (label said 4-6 hours), listening to the
mechanics work on the DK compressor.<br />
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I went to bed that night positively delusional (in
hindsight):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sure that by morning our
compressor would be working, as well as that of Dive Kiribas. In the morning,
ours was still spewing black smoke, and the DK compressor sprung a fuel leak.
Of course. By noon we decided to do some water sampling and install some
temperature and salinity sensors, before we exploded in frustration. We did
quite a bit of free-diving, and used one remnant tank that had 2000psi to
install all the sensors. When we got back, however, no compressor. In fact,
they had decided to swap in another World War II vintage engine – it would be at
least another full day of repairs. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The wind had gone out of my sails – Christmas had finally sucked the optimism right out of me. That is a very hard thing to do to this seasoned field guru. I went to bed that night facing the reality that we wouldn’t
get any of our primary science goals done. There would be no dive tanks. I
might as well get used to it. I hardly slept that night. At 6am, I leapt out of bed on a
mission – I was not going to go down without a fight. Let’s just say I conveyed
my extreme displeasure to the DK manager while asking her if she knew of any
other compressor (dive rated or no) on the island. I told her the entire
year-long project was at risk. I reminded her how much money myself, Julia, and
the other PIs of the project had on the line. I began brainstorming. What about
the two industrial fishing boats anchored off the pier? Maybe. What about the
airport? No. Then (and I have no earthly idea why this hadn’t come up sooner),
she tells me that her neighbor two doors down has a SCUBA compressor. What?!? I
walk over there, and sure enough, in a back room of a compound devoted to the
aquarium fish trade, there is an aging compressor – electric, thank God. The
irony of the situation did not escape me. The aquarium fish trade plucks unrestricted
quantities of pretty fish off the reef for sale in Honolulu and beyond. Yet they had just
saved our entire science program - one dedicated to studying reef resilience to climate change and human disturbance. Unreal.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The kind man gave me the 6 tanks he had filled, and
suddenly I’m planning a day of diving! And believe me, Christmas Island never
looked so beautiful as it did that morning, motoring out to the reef for a day
of science. I’m not entirely sure the boat even touched the water. And the reef itself never looked so beautiful. I admit to lingering for at
least a half hour at each of our work sites, swimming around, taking it all in,
snapping some cheesy photos with Pam. At one particularly beautiful site, our
last for the day, the light was just perfect – the low angle added some reds to
the reef, and the colors just shone. There was an incredibly diverse set of large colonies that piled up to form
walls 6ft high on either side of white sand channels 3-4ft wide. As I made my way
through the living maze, I suddenly realized that if a strong El Niño arrives
this winter, it would decimate these dazzling corals. They looked healthy and
strong now, but they would be no match for sustained 4-5F warming. And in the
back of my brain, far removed from science and NSF and publications, I thought
“Maybe it’s OK if this El Niño is weak after all.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Showing off my handiwork, having installed a temperature logger (aka yellow stick) on the reef.<br />
Note the SCUBA tank and bubbles ascending from my regulator. Hallelujah.</td></tr>
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Kim Cobbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01936841371990199588noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6522721105062281795.post-66909931958679501562014-09-03T00:54:00.000-07:002014-09-03T01:05:50.719-07:00What a long, strange trip it's been<div class="MsoNormal">
by Kim Cobb<br />
<br />
Today we are on our way to the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
where we will install a large number of temperature and salinity sensors around
Christmas Island (2<span style="font-family: Arial;">°</span>N, 157<span style="font-family: Arial;">°</span>W), in the hopes of capturing the dramatic
environmental shifts associated with the strong El Niño event this coming
winter. But will it actually materialize?<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Many months have passed since my <a href="http://cobblab.blogspot.com/2014/03/all-eyes-on-tropical-pacific.html">blog post</a> about the
potential for a very strong El Niño event this winter. Two months later I
sealed my fate by tweeting the following:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Going on record for a strong El Niño this winter, amplitude of 2.5+/-
0.3<span style="font-family: Arial;">°</span>C as measured by NIÑO3 SST. Anybody else in? #nogutsnoglory” In late spring,
the Atmospheric and Geospace Science and Biology divisions at NSF funded myself
and four other PIs to gather a suite of physical oceanographic and ecological
data from Christmas and Palmyra Islands. These remote coral atolls lie near the
equator in the central tropical Pacific, in the very heart of El Niño action. In
doing so, NSF took a fairly big gamble that the climate <span style="background-color: white;">models forecasting </span>a significant El Niño
for this winter were accurate. They hoped that our group would document the impacts,
both physical and biological, of a large El Niño event in unprecedented detail.
I refer readers to our inaugura<span style="background-color: white;">l <a href="http://elnino2014.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-rush-to-beat-el-nino-to-equator.html">post</a>
</span>on the project to read about our research goals and their broader relevance.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Months of planning and many tens of thousands of dollars
later, our entire science team is now deployed on the equator for the first of
three large, coordinated expeditions. In our “divide and conquer” strategy,
<a href="http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/merrifield.html">Mark Merrifield</a>’s team is currently on Palmyra to install moored arrays of sensors that
will log temperature, salinity, and currents with incredible accuracy and
precision. <a href="http://www2.hawaii.edu/~slgs/">Samantha Stevenson</a> (a climate modeler turned field buff for the
month) is setting up the seawater and rainwater collecti<span style="background-color: white;">on program at Palmyra,
so that we can monitor the El Niño’s effects on the atmospheric and oceanic
distributions of oxygen isotopes. This isotope system forms the basis of <a href="http://shadow.eas.gatech.edu/~kcobb/research/corals/corals.html">our
reconstructions of <span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">paleo-El
Niño events</span> i</a></span><a href="http://shadow.eas.gatech.edu/~kcobb/research/corals/corals.html">n corals from these sites</a>. Meteorological stations on both islands will log a suite of atmospheric
variables, including winds, rainfall, and pressure. On Christmas Island, we
will join <a href="http://baumlab.weebly.com/">Julia Baum</a>’s team of reef ecologists in surveying up to a dozen sites
that she’s been monitoring for the last 5 years. We are excited to learn their
elaborate sampling protocols, even if it means signing on to their 4-dives-a-day,
9-hr boat operations. And we thought fossil coral scavenging on sun-baked
beaches was hard work…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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So<span style="background-color: white;"> here’s the million dollar question:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will there be a strong El Niño event this winter?
Note that most <a href="http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/">climatemodels do forecast a moderate El Niño event</a>. But we are really banking on (quite
literally) The Big One. Admittedly, much of the wi</span>nd has gone out of the El
Nino sails this summer, when favorable conditions in<span style="background-color: white;"> <span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">mid-June</span> (</span>see Figure 1) gave way to a near death
experience by late July. However, a modest westerly wind burst in mid-August
has breathed new life into the tropical Pacific, with a prominent depression of
the thermocline making its way eastward. The only remaining hope for a strong
El Niño event rests on the subsequent surface warming that will appear in the
next weeks in the eastern equatorial Pacific, and a concomitant relaxation of
the trade winds. Whether the trades weaken enough to sustain the depression of
the thermocline and associated surface warming is unknown. I will say that the
persistent warm SST anomalies near the dateline throughout the spring and
summer (see Figure 1) have not helped, as they weaken the atmospheric punch of
the intermittent surface warmings in the eastern equatorial Pacific. Upon
waking today, however, I noted that anomalies of >1<span style="font-family: Arial;">°</span>C are now visible across a broad
swathe of the eastern equatorial Pacific. So there is still a chance for a
major event to take shape, but that window is rapidly closing. These next few
weeks are critical.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzm3Wm62jyMNqR0y8WgvNAMD9YcrNO858-RDY1gAwS0T_QAHcHeVmx9rBBdq2vwwgGcsk8W5B2B7UW3Yjve8qVL4CrJ7QqKHwKYgSZlPmblA2zGxXvbHyfThCL7hkTbeYeMYXPqiBMhec/s1600/fig1_web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzm3Wm62jyMNqR0y8WgvNAMD9YcrNO858-RDY1gAwS0T_QAHcHeVmx9rBBdq2vwwgGcsk8W5B2B7UW3Yjve8qVL4CrJ7QqKHwKYgSZlPmblA2zGxXvbHyfThCL7hkTbeYeMYXPqiBMhec/s1600/fig1_web.jpg" height="640" width="603" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maps of 5-day averaged SST and wind anomalies across the equatorial Pacific, ending in the date specified. The region of westerly wind burst activity is indicated in the red box. "Favorable" winds blow from the west towards the east, and drive equatorial warming in the eastern Pacific in the next months, furthering the development of El Niño conditions. The blue 'X' marks the location of Christmas and Palmyra Islands. The top plot shows average SST and winds for the 5-day period ending on June 15, 2014, for reference. Plots from http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/</td></tr>
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For the purposes of our research at Christmas and Palmyra,
the ~0.5-1<span style="font-family: Arial;">°</span>C warming that has characterized the last 6 months at these sites may
have already had significant impacts on the coral reef ecosystem. So in terms of El Niño impacts, we might be
perfectly placed to capture the peak of what might be a relatively stro<span style="background-color: white;">ng ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o#The_.22Modoki.22_or_Central-Pacific_El_Ni.C3.B1o_debate">central Pacific El Niño</a>’.
In th</span>at sense, our research would be an important contribution to ecological and
climate science (and specifically, their intersection), as many models project
a shift towards such events in coming decades.<br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Stay tuned for updates from the field over the next two weeks!<br />
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Kim Cobbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01936841371990199588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6522721105062281795.post-17480554312363796522014-06-12T14:41:00.002-07:002014-06-12T14:42:34.972-07:00A rush to beat El Niño to the equatorIt's official! The National Science Foundation has just funded our small team of scientists to document the effects of the coming El Niño event on coral reefs at Kiritimati Island, a remote atoll located in the central equatorial Pacific. During El Niño events, the waters surrounding these island warm by as much as five degrees Fahrenheit, causing appreciable thermal stress to the island's corals.<br />
<br />
I've been waiting for an opportunity to witness an El Niño at Kiritimati first-hand since 1997, when as a 1st year graduate student I found myself at Kiritimati during the peak of the 1997-98 El Niño event - the largest event of the last century, by some metrics. The reef that I saw bore clear signs of thermal stress in the form of bleached coral colonies, many of which had been further compromised by boring clams and other invertebrates.<br />
<br />
Since then, I've made a number of visits to Kiritimati in support of my <a href="http://shadow.eas.gatech.edu/~kcobb/">climate research</a>, which uses geochemical signals in living and so-called "fossil" coral skeletons to reconstruct El Niño events over the last 7,000 years. Last year, while diving in search of large coral colonies to drill for the Showtime documentary "<a href="http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/">Years of Living Dangerously</a>", I noted that the corals had largely recovered - 15 years after the 1997/98 El Niño. We still have a very hard time finding a core that doesn't have a disturbance of some sort across the 1997/98 horizon (now covered by roughly a foot of additional coral growth). What happened to this reef during the El Niño? How bad did it get? Who were the survivors? And why?<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7YePAC1Md2tLMbUVSRBjgQJzgMyq-QEX8rtGvUk_UYIoPya5FPj1yir73W77ovHeHwL_oruJCu55dVoyDNDv_CU_iob21lLvkPtxbX4Zl4Url1effUT9cQN7S4HCH9uL_qYFaPb4M0MA/s1600/JB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7YePAC1Md2tLMbUVSRBjgQJzgMyq-QEX8rtGvUk_UYIoPya5FPj1yir73W77ovHeHwL_oruJCu55dVoyDNDv_CU_iob21lLvkPtxbX4Zl4Url1effUT9cQN7S4HCH9uL_qYFaPb4M0MA/s1600/JB.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Julia Baum</td></tr>
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So when a combination of Pacific Ocean<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-hAPB2swMKixuir4InOCzyNiv5MJXfvjm5ow2SCA_cVQb-N1cx4dwoVg_3iIaHXgtHUvp2i_DMXny7QOX6qe6vvMDXqdA-fThoKrdPROYPUh168n6B0SzDC2EeVtW2MfSRduNz5YgvRU/s1600/gates.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-hAPB2swMKixuir4InOCzyNiv5MJXfvjm5ow2SCA_cVQb-N1cx4dwoVg_3iIaHXgtHUvp2i_DMXny7QOX6qe6vvMDXqdA-fThoKrdPROYPUh168n6B0SzDC2EeVtW2MfSRduNz5YgvRU/s1600/gates.jpg" height="200" width="171" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Ruth Gates</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
conditions provided the first hazy view of a developing El Niño (see my post <a href="http://cobblab.blogspot.com/2014/03/all-eyes-on-tropical-pacific.html">here</a>), I called two renowned coral ecologists. One, <a href="http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rgates/Gates_Lab_Website/Gates_Lab.html">Dr. Ruth Gates</a>, is a colleague at my academic home-away-from-home, the University of Hawaii, where I'm on sabbatical. She recently won the Paul G. Allen Ocean Challenge to design corals that are more resilient to climate change. The second scientist is someone whose name I'd seen scrawled on dozens of storage crates on Kiritimati for the last 5 years, but had never met - <a href="http://baumlab.weebly.com/">Dr. Julia Baum</a>, from University of Victoria. Dr. Baum has been conducting surveys and collecting samples of fish and corals at Kiritimati for years, aiming to evaluate the impact of anthropogenic stressors on this remote reef ecosystem. At the same time, an effort to document the physical oceanographic effects of the El Niño on nearby Palmyra Island was just taking shape, led by U. Hawaii postdoc <a href="http://www2.hawaii.edu/~slgs/">Dr. Samantha Stevenson</a>, with <a href="http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/merrifield.html">Dr. Mark Merrifield</a> (UH) and <a href="http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/powell.html">Dr. Brian Powell </a>(UH) as part of that team. We decided to join forces and design an integrated science plan that took advantage of the synergies among our team member's core expertise.<br />
<br />
It didn't take long for us to realize we were posed to conduct ground-breaking research investigating the oceanographic and coral reef impacts of an ephemeral but global-scale climatic extreme - the 2014/2015 El Niño event. Now the only question was how to obtain funds to get down to the equator *before* the warming accelerates, sometime this summer. In mid-May, roughly one month after our initial conversations, we submitted two NSF 'RAPID' proposals - one to the Biology directorate, and one to the Geoscience directorate - which have now been funded. These precious and timely funds will allow us to visit Kiritimati and Palmyra in mid-August to conduct pre-event surveys of reef health, as well as install an array of environmental monitoring devices. We are scheduled to visit again in January 2015, close to the peak of the El Niño warming, and then again in May, 2015 as the warming dissipates.<br />
<br />
Science-wise, we will be focused on characterizing the physical, geochemical, and ecological changes that occur at these islands over the course of the El Niño. For my part, I'll be collecting seawater temperature, salinity, and oxygen isotopes across the event, which I will use to compare to the oxygen isotopic record of the event as recorded in coral cores that I drill next year. Dr. Baum and her team will be conducting detailed ecological surveys and collecting samples of coral tissue for genomics analyses in Dr. Gates' lab. I am never sure which species of coral I core (they all look fairly similar), let alone the genetic makeup of the algal symbionts that inhabit individual coral colonies. I am betting that such information will yield important new insights about how to interpret the <a href="http://hurricane.ncdc.noaa.gov/pls/paleox/f?p=519:1:::::P1_STUDY_ID:13672">trove of paleoclimate records</a> that I've amassed from Kiritimiti corals. For the ecologists' part, they are excited to have detailed information about environmental conditions at their far-flung survey sights - conditions that may explain why some reefs fare better or worse through this natural climate extreme. The physical oceanographers will deploy a dense array of current meters as well as CTDs to log ocean temperature and salinity. The observed time series will be compared to the output from an isotope-equippped ocean model that Dr. Stevenson has been developing, as well as the resulting isotopic time series from corals that span the event.<br />
<br />
In the long run, our study will provide a snapshot of how the remote coral reefs on Kiritimati were reshaped by the 2014-15 El Niño, and isolate some of the key factors in determining the resilience of these valuable coral reef ecosystems to such natural temperature extremes. Given that natural climate extremes occur on top of a baseline of steady anthropogenic warming, results from such short-term studies may hold the key to understanding the long-term impacts of climate change on reef ecosystems.<br />
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<br />Kim Cobbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01936841371990199588noreply@blogger.com1