Award: OCE-1446274

Summary of activities and findings:

            The funded project sought to monitor remote coral reefs in the central equatorial Pacific across the 2014/2015 El Niño event. In particular, funding provided for multiple field expeditions to Christmas Island, located in the Republic of Kiribati, by an interdisciplinary team of scientists including physical oceanographers, climate scientists, and coral reef ecologists and genomicists. During these trips, we installed and maintained a variety of environmental sensors on the reef to monitor ocean temperatures and salinity through the event, and surveyed the coral reef via SCUBA to quantify species abundances, coral health, and fish populations. As it happens, the 2014/2015 El Niño event that was forecasted by all the major forecasting centers did not materialize, but we were able to collect an unprecedented dataset of coral reef environment and composition leading up to the record-breaking 2015/2016 El Niño event. The data collected as part of the RAPID included an expedition in November, 2015 that documented the early signs of coral bleaching and mortality on the Christmas Island Reef. The continuous timeseries of environmental, geochemical, and ecological data spans from 2014-2016 continuously, making it the longest and most comprehensive dataset from a remote coral reef. As such, it will provide a valuable resource for oceanographers, ecologists, and geochemists for years to come, capturing the impacts of the largest El Niño event in recorded history. Our analysis of the vast trove of environmental data, coral survey data, and coral tissue genomics continues in earnest, as the project shifts from data collection to data interpretation and eventual publication. Two high-profile publications are currently in preparation, to be submitted in the next 1-2 months.

Broader impacts:

            The PI has conducted a suite of broader impact activities over the last year related to the RAPID project. Specifically, she has given over 10 public lectures in the last year, including a high-profile TedX talk, and conducted over 30 press interviews for national TV, print media, on-line media, and radio about her paleoclimate research in the context of the current global coral bleaching event under investigation. The entire team contributed blog posts to the dedicated blog for this project:

http://elnino2014.blogspot.com

as well as on the Cobb Lab Blog

http://cobblab.blogspot.com

over the course of the project, containing descriptions of our research designed specifically for the public.

Additionally, funds were used to support five female undergraduate researchers (Kayla Townsend, Gemma Stone, Melat Hagos, Katie Tokos, and Shelby Miller), including two African-Americans, as well as two high school research assistants (including one female) in the lab during the 2015-2016 school year.

Examples of press for the RAPID project:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/world/asia/climate-related-death-of-coral-around-world-alarms-scientists.html

http://e360.yale.edu/mobile/feature.msp?id=2987

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/dead-coral-reefs-climate-adaptation-20241

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-05-04/the-environmental-outlook-update-on-coral-reef-bleaching-and-possible-new-remedies

Last Modified: 08/09/2016
Modified by: Kim M Cobb