Taking the Temperature

During a recent trip to islands of Micronesia, WHOI marine chemist Konrad Hughen and his team surveyed shallow water reefs to study the response of corals to global warming and ocean acidification. As part of the expedition, team members extracted cores from large corals using a water-powered drill. The cores contain physical and chemical clues to how the reef environment changed over the lifetime of the coral and how the corals responded to those changes.(Photo by Whitney Bernstein, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)