Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Pamela Grothe
Pamela Grothe, a climate scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., is working to understand how much of these El Niño temperature surges are related to the warming climate.
Grothe and her team have traveled to the [Christmas] island several times to collect samples by drilling cores through corals and taking them back to the lab for analysis.
“One millimeter (in the sample) equates to about one month of coral growth, so that equates to a monthly sea surface temperature. We can plot the temperature record right on top of the geochemistry records, and it is actually really amazing,” she said. Read more.