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A Coral Timestamp

MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate students Thomas DeCarlo and Hannah Barkley cover a coral colony in Palau with a bag containing a mixture of seawater and a harmless pink dye. The dye infuses into the skeletons of the corals as they grow, creating a skeletal timestamp. In a few months, they will return to the site and remove a small core from the coral. The location of the stain line in the core will provide crucial information about the coral’s growth rate and its response to ocean conditions. DeCarlo and Barkley, both students in Anne Cohen’s lab, are investigating coral growth mechanisms and how they may be adversely affected by rising ocean temperatures and ocean acidification.(Photo by Hannah Barkley, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)