UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1126

Overall Research Project Description The eastern and central Pacific are the key action sites for monitoring ENSO activity in the tropical Pacific. Scleractinian ("stony") corals fossils (up to 5,000 years old) are deposited along the shores of islands and coral atolls in the central and eastern Pacific and collected for paleoclimate reconstruction due to their distinct geochemical signals that can tract past changes in oceanographic conditions (e.g. sea surface temperature (SST), salinity, etc). However, there many questions surrouding the coral geochemistry and paleoclimatology of the tropical Pacific. A couple of these questions include: 1) how has climate variability changed in the past 5,000 years? 2) What do past differences in climate variability in the eastern versus central pacific look like?

Interested students will assist graduate research assistants in studying how the tropical Pacific Ocean has been changing from the mid- to late Holocene using the geochemistry of coral skeletons as a natural archive of ocean temperature and hydrology. The student will work in a laboratory setting collecting and analyzing geochemical data in fossil corals from Kiritimati, Kiribati and the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. Specifically, the student will assist in preparing samples for radiocarbon dating, drilling coral skeletons for geochemical analysis, assisting with geochemical experiments, and assisting graduate students with general laboratory tasks.