How can a coral skeleton tell us what the weather was like hundreds of years ago?
Grace Frank looks after AIMS’ coral core archives – an invaluable repository of Australian reef history. Marine scientists carefully drill coral cores from ancient massive corals. Think of them like ice cores or tree rings, where the annual growth rings in the skeletons – which the corals lay down over centuries – and their chemical composition tell a story stretching into the past.
Grace has lots of cool kit to help analyse the cores. Here she demonstrates the UV photobooth, which reveals sediment layers left behind by heavy rainfall and flood events during the tropical Queensland summer.
🪸 Learn more about AIMS coral core research: https://vist.ly/5im6e
