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Students
Ongoing Research
Bamboo corals as records of climate change in the ocean's interior
 Left: Pieces of a bamboo coral skeleton, showing calcite sections with organic nodes. Scale bar is 5cm.
This research utilizes bamboo corals, which reside at intermediate depths (250 to 2500m) along the California margin as records of the temperature, geochemistry, and ventilation history of north Pacific intermediate waters. This research project is in collaboration with H. Spero (UC Davis) and investigators at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).
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| Above: Cross-sectional view of
calcite skeleton of bamboo coral,
showing radial growth bands. |
Bamboo corals have a skeleton that is composed of both calcite sections and organic nodes. Bamboo corals produce visible alternating bands in their calcium carbonate skeleton. The frequency of the banding is hypothesized to be annual or sub-annual (Roark et al., 2005). Bamboo corals can live for hundred of years, preserving a high-resolution record of environmental conditions at intermediate depths. Despite the geographic extent and importance of these corals as part of the deep-sea ecosystem, very little is understood about their biology, geochemistry, and biogeography.
For more information, please visit the website of our recent MBARI/NOAA cruise, and check out our recently submitted abstract to the American Geophysical Union Fall 2007 Meeting, Link to PDF >>
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation and NOAA’s Undersea Research Program
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Causes and consequences of the Storegga submarine landslide: Was methane hydrate involved?
Location of Storegga slide
The Storegga slide (offshore Norway) is the largest known submarine slide on a continental margin, affecting an area of ~95,000 km 2 and associated with tsunami deposits in Scotland, Norway, and Iceland (Haflidason et al., 2005; Bondevik et al., 2005). The Storegga landslide occurred in the early Holocene (~8.1 ka) and is hypothesized to be associated with the disturbance of gas hydrates on the Norwegian continental margin during deglacial warming and sea level rise. I am investigating the sedimentary history of the Storegga landslide and associated implications for gas hydrate stability, with collaborators C. Paull (MBARI), B. Ussler (MBARI) and S. Holbrook (U Wyoming).
 Analyses of benthic foraminiferal assemblages from the Storegga slide, on board the R/V Knorr,
September 2004.
For more information on this project, please check out our recently submitted abstract to the American Geophysical Union Fall 2007 meeting, Link to PDF >> |
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