The Cruise Track and Mission

This cruise departs from Guam and wraps up in Pohnpei, the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia.  Between these two destinations we will be hopping from atoll to atoll, spending a maximum of 2 days at each site. If we are running behind schedule, we will have to bypass some of the sites.

Cruise track from Guam to Pohnpei with one stop in Pohnpei for re-provisioning.

The mission of our expedition is two-fold. First, we will collect long cores of coral skeleton from large boulder-like colonies in order to reconstruct past climate patterns.  Basically, we take a “biopsy” of the skeleton and we look at the annual layers (which are like tree-rings) to count back the years. By sampling and analyzing the mineral from each annual layer, we construct a chemical record which can be translated into a climate record using a calibration that works like a code.  I will explain this science mission in more detail later, but for now, Konrad and Justin will be doing the major drilling on scuba, and Sujata (a recent college grad who has interned in our lab) and I will be assisting and documenting the operation using underwater cameras. 

The second part of the mission is to assess and document the health of the reefs from many different angles. We have one team looking at the microbial communities on the corals. Another team will document the species present and will quantify the presence of disease. And I will be measuring how fast the coral community is growing. I will explain all of these components in more detail, one at a time.  I will also explain why we care about coral reefs and these reefs in particular in a later post.