The overall goal of this project is to reconstruct a history of North Atlantic climate from this 500-year old Brain Coral (diploria labyrinthiformis) which we retrieved from 50-feet depth at the south-eastern edge of the Bermuda platform.

A Record of NAO in Bermuda Brain Coral
Anne L. Cohen, Michael S. McCartney, Struan R. Smith and Jackie van Etten
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The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is the major source of climate variability in the Atlantic sector on inter-annual to decadal time-scales and may be a key player in the dramatic climatic changes experienced by surrounding countries over the past 50 years. The instrumental record of NAO is too short to enable an assessment of its variability prior to the industrial era nor its behavior on multi-decadal to centennial time scales. A longer history of NAO must therefore be obtained indirectly from proxy records. Our study focuses on extracting North Atlantic climate information from the skeletons of massive, reef-building corals. We show here that geochemical and structural changes in the skeleton of braincorals from Bermuda reflect changes in the NAO index over the past 40 years.

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