How Corals Hold Centuries of Ocean Climate Data

HOW CORALS HOLD CENTURIES OF OCEAN CLIMATE DATA

Published July 7, 2018.

[MUSIC]

[Camera flies over a small lighthouse to a wide shot of the ocean under a cloudy sky.]

NATHALIE GOODKIN (Associate Curator, Division of Physical Sciences):

You can look out at a calm ocean, and it looks like nothing’s happening,

[Camera dives under the ocean and swims over a coral reef.]

GOODKIN: But in reality, there are so many forces that are happening within that water.

[Timelapse of a sunset to night over a beach. Surfers race over a huge wave.]

GOODKIN: It’s going to change at night. It’s going to change depending on where you are on the planet.

[Seals lounge on a small ice floe.]

GOODKIN: You have ice that’s melting and forming.

[Moving through a swarm of small jellyfish. Close-up of a bleached coral.]

GOODKIN: The pH will change as you change how much CO2 gets absorbed.

[Nathalie Goodkin appears on screen in an office with dried corals arranged on a table behind her.]

GOODKIN: So, really, there’s nothing in the ocean that’s static. And that makes it even harder to study, because any point in time is only really reflective of that point in time.

[The Museum logo appears over a view of the ocean’s surface as seen from beneath the waves. Cut to two side-by-side videos, one of a sensor of some kind, the other of two people hoisting a drone into the air from the deck of a ship.]

GOODKIN: We’ve only been recording the environment in detail for the last, maybe, 20 years,

[Archival footage of waves crashing on a beach, a man with a pipe taking notes, and of an anchor sinking to a reef.]

GOODKIN: with some ship data from the past 120 years.

[Nathalie Goodkin reappears on screen. Lower third caption reads “Nathalie Goodkin, Assistant Curator, Division of Physical Sciences]

GOODKIN: We can go ahead and measure for hundreds of years in the future, but the imperative to understand how our climate system works is really now.

[A school of fish feeds on corals.]

GOODKIN: And so, we need to understand the system back through history.

[Corals and sponges collect on a shipwreck. Cut to towers of coral with fish swimming around them.]

GOODKIN: I think it would surprise people to know that there are natural instruments that we have in the ocean collecting this data for us.

[Timelapse of a many-branched coral growing.]

GOODKIN: Corals grow in these large formations, and they’re building skeleton as they grow.

[A cloud of white particles appears and disappears into a coral. This repeats with green and red particles.]

GOODKIN: As they secrete their skeletons, they will take in chemicals from the sea water based on the conditions they’re growing in.

[Scuba divers insert a drill into a huge boulder coral.]

GOODKIN: And so, we can go back and look at specific chemicals that tell us information about

[An x-ray of a coral appears. Motion graphic circles highlight different areas and text reads: “Boron – acidity, Strontium – temperature, Barium – freshwater runoff, Oxygen – salinity, temperature, Carbon – ocean mixing.”]

GOODKIN: temperature, pH, salinity, and reconstruct those environmental conditions over the past several hundred years.

[A coral reef brimming with fish. The camera focuses on fossilized polyps of fossil corals. Pan over a yellowing specimen tag reading “Stylastraea anna, Whitfield, Upper Helderberg Limestone Falls of the Ohio, Central Ohio.”]

GOODKIN: A living coral would go back 500 years, but we can also look at fossil corals that can go back through the last 10,000 years.

[Nathalie Goodkin reappears on screen.]

GOODKIN: At this point, humans are having a very large impact on the environment, a larger impact than we can understand what will happen as a result.

[Sushi rushes by on a conveyor belt. Traffic rushes over a bridge. A drain tunnel empties into a small stream.]

GOODKIN: Little changes can make such a large difference in how the ocean moves and circulates,

[Timelapse satellite images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Cut to a sea turtle gliding through the water.]

GOODKIN: and what that means for the life that’s in it.

[Whales surface on a hazy grey ocean. A researcher takes notes in the back of a boat.]

GOODKIN: The only way that we can really improve our ability to make good management decisions

[Scuba divers swim towards corals. A diver holds up one bleached coral and one unbleached coral.]

GOODKIN: is to understand how the system worked before we were impacting it.

[Nathalie Goodkin reappears on screen.]

GOODKIN: Protecting corals is important for so many reasons.

[A ray hides among big flat corals. A school of long skinny fish feed on corals.]

GOODKIN: It’s really, really important for biodiversity.

[Waves break on rocks and reefs a little bit offshore.]

GOODKIN: They provide significant coastal protection in storms.

[Nathalie Goodkin reappears on screen.]

GOODKIN: And from my perspective, it would take us enormous numbers of years and financial dollars to instrument the earth as well as the reefs are.

[A colorful reef with fish swimming above it.]

GOODKIN: Being able to preserve these samples provides us with an enormous resource for understanding our climate system, both in the future and back in time.

[END MUSIC]

[Title screen appears.

Video

AMNH / L. Stevens & L. Rifkind

AMNH / A. Lenzo, H. Gentry, R. Miyamoto

AMNH / K. Corben

Konrad Hughen, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

NOAA Adopt a Drifter Program

NOAA Fisheries

Patrick Martin, Nanyang Technological University

Wildlife Conservation Society

Images / Archive

AMNH / Microscopy and Imaging Facility

NASA MODIS Rapid Response Team

Music

“Ghost Within” by Jay Price (PRS) / Warner/Chappell Production Music]