Prof. Dr. Jody Michael Webster 

Coral reef systems around the world face an uncertain future. Global climate change scenarios predict increases in sea-levels, temperatures, and ocean acidification by 2100. These changes may already be having profound effects on global climate, coastlines and the health of coral reefs around the world. To place these future challenges into an appropriate context, it is vital, now more than ever, to better constrain the nature and origin of past abrupt global sea-level and climate change events, and crucially understand how coral reef systems responded to these changes.

This HWK Fellowship will address these challenges directly by investigating a globally unique sequence of drowned fossil coral reefs from offshore Hawaii and the Great Barrier Reef that grew and died repeatedly during different periods of major and abrupt climate instability and environmental stress. Working closely with international collaborators, including German scientists, this project will fundamentally advance our understanding of how coral reef systems respond to a multitude of environmental stresses (e.g., rising/falling sea-levels, changing sea surface temperatures, ocean acidity, and declining water quality) over a range of different magnitudes and time scales during the past 500,000 years. This project will illuminate and disentangle the key drivers and environmental thresholds that control coral reef system demise, and the nature and rate of recovery after disturbance events.