Corals and Climate Variability Dr. Sujata Murty, an Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, answers questions about her oceanic research. What are some of the main objectives of your project? My research involves using corals as archives or recorders of past climate variability. Corals are amazing climate archives because they grow continuously for hundreds of years, incorporating characteristics of their surrounding ocean environment as they grow, such as temperature, ocean salinity, ocean circulation, and pollution. Corals are also a lot like tree rings, growing annual density bands that we can visualize by taking an x-ray of the coral and counting the bands/years back through time. The fast growth and banding patterns of corals together allow us to get records of monthly changes in climate and environmental Sujata Murty assists with extracting a coral core piece from conditions and compare summer/winter or wet/dry monsoon the underwater drill in Micronesia seasons through time! This is extremely important in the IndoPacific region, where 2/3 of the global population is impacted by the Asian Monsoon. The objectives of my research are to 1) use corals from the Indo-Pacific to reconstruct ocean temperature, salinity, circulation, and precipitation over the past few hundred years and, 2) synthesize these records with ocean and climate models to understand what’s driving the variability. Doing so allows us to better understand past changes in climate, which can improve our understanding and prediction of future changes in a warming world. Right now, I’m working on corals from the Indonesian Seas, central Indian Ocean and Red Sea to understand how climate influences the distribution of heat and freshwater in the Indian Ocean (one of our most understudied tropical ocean regions). What made you interested in researching this topic? I’ve always been mesmerized by the ocean, having grown up in Wisconsin. However, it was really when I took a class in college focused on the biology, geology and politics of coral reefs that my love for coral reef regions took off. I decided I wanted a career where I would get to SCUBA dive and visit reef regions, which I still get to do on occasion to collect my coral samples! After that class I started pursuing summer and winter research internships with coral scientists and happened to get involved with coral paleoclimate research early on. I fell in love with the project and knew this is what I wanted to pursue for my career. My Info-Pacific focus stems from getting my Ph.D. in Singapore where I had fantastic opportunities to study Southeast Asian climate and ocean systems.
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