Coral Chemistry

MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Chawalit “Net” Charoenpong teaches WHOI Summer Student Fellow Brooke Rasina to measure the amount of nitrogen in coral skeleton samples using a laboratory instrument called a NOx Box. Rasina, now a senior at the University of California, San Diego, worked with her WHOI advisors, marine chemists Scott Wankel and Konrad Hughen, to measure nitrogen in corals from the Red Sea. The goal of the project is to use the chemical and isotopic composition of the coral skeletons to track the input of nitrogen—which is both a nutrient and a pollutant—to Red Sea reef ecosystems over the past few centuries. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)