Ruins, Not Reefs: How Climate Change Is Fast-Forwarding Coral Science
“It’s a complete change in the phenomenon that all of us study.”
At about the same moment that millions of Americans sat staring at their television or laptop or phone—watching the results from the presidential election stream in, seeing state after state called for Donald Trump—Kim Cobb was SCUBA diving near the center of the Pacific Ocean. She did not watch the same trickle of news as other Americans. She surfaced, heard the results, and dove in the water again. She was, after all, attending to devastation.
Cobb is a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. On November 8, she was on her most recent of is pronounced like ) She first began studying the reef in 1997, during the last big El Niño warming event; she has returned nearly every year since. Last year, she went three times.
