Climate change revs up in 2016 - an eyewitness account from the South Pacific

• This event is a production of the Atlanta Science Tavern.
• It is free and open to the public, although contributions are welcome to help us defray costs of our program.
• Seating is on a first-come basis.
• Reservations are not required to attend.
• We gather for dinner at 7:00 pm.
• The evening's presentation gets under way around 7:45.
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  Climate change revs up in 2016 - an eyewitness account from the South Pacific

Kim Cobb, Professor and Georgia Power Faculty Scholar
School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology

Science has long established that the world's climate is undergoing rapid change. And, it appears, that that change is speeding up. Kim Cobb, Professor in Georgia Tech's school of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, knows this first-hand.

The mission of Kim Cobb's lab (http://cobblab.blogspot.com/) is to uncover the mechanisms of global climate change, both natural and anthropogenic, in order to inform projections of future climate change. They focus primarily on the generation of new high-resolution records of past tropical Pacific climate variability from corals and cave stalagmites, with an emphasis on the last decades to centuries. Through the thoughtful combination of climate models and data, they seek to characterize natural climate variability in this region and identify climate trends that are associated with anthropogenic climate change.

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Algae-coated dead coral on the first dive of the Spring 2016 expedition to Christmas Island's south reef. In this view, there is only one small coral still alive - a half bleached/half dead Porites colony in the lower left. Credit: Kim Cobb.
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This past spring Kim and members of her group returned to Christmas Island in the South Pacific to document the effects of the ongoing El Niño event on the coral reef there. They did not know that they would face major ordeal after major ordeal, all while confronting a mass mortality event of staggering proportions on the island’s pristine coral reefs.

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About Kim
Kim Cobb’s research uses corals and cave stalagmites to reconstruct tropical Pacific temperature and rainfall patterns over the last decades to millennia. She received her B.A. from Yale University in 1996, and her Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in 2002. She spent two years at Caltech in the Department of Geological and Planetary Sciences before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2004.

Kim has sailed on six oceanographic cruises and led five caving expeditions to the rainforests of Borneo in support of her research. Her papers regularly appear in high-profile journals, including 5 papers in Nature or Science. Kim has received numerous awards for her research, most notably a NSF CAREER Award in 2007, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008, and a Sigma Chi Best Paper Award in 2013.