On June 8, seven BIOS employees will take part in a virtual career fair hosted by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) in honor of World Oceans Day. The event’s theme, “The Ocean: Life & Livelihoods,” is designed to help local high school and college students explore the wide variety of career opportunities that exist in fields related to ocean science.

Earlier this year, Eric Hochberg, a reef systems ecologist at BIOS, was awarded two grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to continue lines of investigation stemming from the four-year NASA COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) mission. Hochberg was principal investigator of CORAL (2015–2019), which utilized a state-of-the-art airborne sensor, called PRISM, to produce the first comprehensive assessment of reef condition for a large portion of the world’s reefs.

A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science has uncovered some unexpected trends in the relationship between coral reefs and their environment, contrary to prevailing scientific expectations and understanding. Authors Eric Hochberg, a BIOS reef systems ecologist, and Michelle Gierach, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), used readily-available public data for coral cover (the amount of coral in a given reef area) to conduct a meta-analysis, or an analysis of data from different studies. In this analysis, they statistically related reef condition to a suite of biogeophysical forcing parameters (forcings), such as aragonite saturation state (a figure thought to impact the ability of corals to calcify), significant wave height, number of coral species, and various local threats, among others.

This summer, due to demand from student applicants, BIOS offered two sessions of its Coral Reef Ecology (CRE) course, one that ran from June 28 to July 16 with 13 students, and the other that ran from August 9 to August 27 with 17 students. The courses were co-taught by reef systems ecologist Eric Hochberg and marine benthic ecologist Yvonne Sawall, with teaching assistant (TA) Michael Wooster. Wooster was Hochberg’s National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates intern in 2014 and has been a TA for three BIOS summer courses and three fall semester courses.

Many people are familiar with—or have at least heard of—the Mariana Trench. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, this crescent-shaped feature on Earth’s crust is the deepest part of the world’s ocean, reaching a maximum depth of 36,070 feet (10,994 meters) in an area known as “Challenger Deep.”

Over two days in late August, a team of nearly 30 scientists, engineers, technicians and project managers met at BIOS to plan their approach for the next phase of the three-year COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) project.

Sitting in a math lecture at the University of Cambridge in England last winter, Scott Li was focused on the course and completing his term work during his third year in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. That is, until a researcher in the university’s Department of Earth Sciences walked in at the end of the lecture to encourage students to apply for the Cawthorn Cambridge Internship at BIOS.

Coral reefs present scientists with a unique challenge. How do you accurately measure ecosystem processes—such as photosynthesis and calcification—within a system that changes over the course of a day and between days (depending on water flow, tides, sunlight, and weather, among other factors) and that also contains a variety of reef types and habitats (such as rim reefs, in-shore reefs, and deep water reefs)?

Understanding our planet and how it functions, as well as the impacts that human activities have on it, requires frequent and extended forays into the field to yield valuable data and observations. The COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) investigation is a prime example. The three-year mission, funded by the NASA Earth Venture Suborbital-2 program, is conducting airborne remote sensing campaigns, along with in-water field validation activities, across four coral reef regions in the western and central Pacific Ocean.

When scientists study coral reefs, they are often interested in figuring out key components of reef health; specifically, primary production—or photosynthesis—and calcification, the rate at which new reef growth occurs. For decades this has meant time and labor-intensive fieldwork, with scientists documenting global reef condition and linking what they see underwater with lab-based experiments and measurements.