Anthropogenic climate change poses a serious threat to coral reefs around the world. The impacts of global warming can be isolated by studying long-lived corals growing on remote, uninhabited islands of the central tropical Pacific, where human impact is nonexistent—this is what NGS/Waitt grantee Dr. Kim Cobb and her team plan to do. By analyzing the chemistry of large coral skeletons collected from reefs in this area, they can reconstruct the monthly history of temperature and rainfall patterns for the last 50 to 100 years.

Tropical Pacific climate oscillations and trends profoundly affect temperature and rainfall patterns around the world, impacting Atlantic hurricane activity, Indian monsoon strength, and drought in the western U.S. An accurate history of tropical Pacific temperatures