Going Deep on Climate Change

On land, tree rings offer one sure way to measure changes in rainfall and to document periods of drought over millenia. Turns out, rings laid down by deep-sea corals can record changes in ocean chemistry and the ocean environment -- including the impacts of climate change over long periods of time.

Next week, a team of American and Australian scientists will use a Woods Hole submersible to study living and fossilized deep-sea corals in the Southern Ocean off Tasmania.

"Deep ocean corals are a litmus test of the deep ocean when it comes to identifying how temperature and salinity have changed over decades and centuries," says Dr. Ron Thresher of CSIRO, chief scientist on the 23-day research voyage.

(CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, is Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.)