Meet our Co-Chief Scientists

Our Co-Chief Scientists, Jody Webster and Christina Ravelo, have been planning this expedition for many years.

Ravelo, a professor in the Ocean Sciences Department at the University of California – Santa Cruz, is an expert in reconstructing and understanding past climate change.

Webster, a Professor in the Geocoastal Research Group, School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, Australia, is an expert on carbonate sedimentology and stratigraphy and interpretation of marine geology and geophysical data.

Learn more about Jody and Christina, and their inspiration, ambitions, and goals for this expedition, in our conversation below.

Can you tell us a little bit about the planning for this expedition? How did the idea originate?

CR: I was involved in the first submission of the proposal, around 15 years ago. It feels great to finally be out here. Corals contain such high-resolution records of past climate events.  It’s very exciting.

JW: The idea for this expedition was born almost 20 years ago, in the early 2000s. The original idea and proposal were formulated with our colleague Dr. David Clague, a volcanologist at MBARI. He was looking at volcanic and fossil coral samples collected using submersibles and ROVs around Hawaii. As a postdoc at MBARI at the time, I was able to work on some of those fossils. My introduction to IODP came in 2005 on an expedition to study drowned reefs in Tahiti. Then in 2010, I led another IODP expedition to investigate sea level change and reef response in the Great Barrier Reef over the last 30,000 years.

The process to get our proposal approved, funded, and organized has required years of hard work. It has taken a profound amount of patience and persistence to get to this point. But I made a promise to myself early on that no matter what, I would see this project through.

Jody, why did you make such a steadfast commitment to this project?

JW: We can answer scientific questions here in Hawaii that we just can’t answer anywhere else. There is a lot of debate about the trajectory of sea level rise in the future. Collecting data from these ancient corals enables us to decipher past sea level and climate events that will help us make more accurate predictions for the future.

Coral reefs have grown and drowned episodically around Hawaii over the last 500 – 600,000 years, but it’s very difficult to collect samples of them with an ROV. Scientists have spent 30 years scratching the surface, but what we really need to do is get into the interior of the reefs – hence why we’re here with a special seafloor coring system to obtain the samples.

What component of this expedition are you most excited about?

CR: That’s like choosing your favorite child! My expertise is in tropical paleo-oceanography. I mostly work with sediments, but there’s a limit to what you can do with those. Corals are annually banded like tree rings so they can give us incredibly detailed data – for example, we can extract information about how summer season precipitation or drought may have been different during the last interglacial period (roughly 125,000 years ago) and other extreme climate periods.

I’m incredibly excited to be working in the middle of the subtropical Pacific – it’s a place where we have almost no data. We know there is a drought on the Hawaiian Islands right now. Is that because of global warming? Probably. But is it part of a pattern? That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.

Our team includes several different types of scientists with various background and expertise. Why is an interdisciplinary team essential for an expedition like this one?

CR: These ecosystems are complicated – there are so many things to look at. It takes multiple scientists to unravel all of the elements. One of the goals is to look at coral reef response to sea level change, but we also need to know what the temperature was, among other things. That’s the beauty of people with different areas of expertise – we need each other to create a comprehensive understanding.

What is your favorite part of working at sea?

CR: Getting really good samples! It’s exciting to open up the cores and see what’s there. I like that they always contain surprises.

JW: I think it’s the excitement of doing and seeing something that no one has ever seen before. Making discoveries. Learning more about how our planet works. I also enjoy working closely with my colleagues – you really get to know people out here. We’re all pushing towards this one goal, and we’re all 100 percent invested in it.