Many important climate research expeditions have been put on ice during the COVID-19 travel bans.
Around 128,000 years ago, the temperatures in the Bahamas were one to two degrees higher than they are today. A group of geologists and geodynamicists from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory visited the area in 2019 to gain a better understanding of how high sea levels were back then — and how future climate change might further exacerbate the effect of surging sea levels on land.
Although they collected coral fossil samples last year in the southern Bahamas, the researchers had planned another fieldwork trip along the shorelines of the northern Bahamas in the late spring of 2020. Rising and falling land levels have confounded calculations of past sea levels, and the researchers think their coral fossil samples will be useful in decoding this conundrum, because the corals grow very close to the sea surface. Together, the 2019 and 2020 datasets would have given valuable insights into solving the mystery.
But, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, worldwide travel bans, and lockdowns, all of the researchers’ plans to travel to the northern Bahamas have come to a screeching halt. The laboratories at Lamont closed in mid-March, so the samples of coral fossils that were painstakingly collected from the southern Bahamas have remained untouched since then. The researchers won’t be able to access or analyze them for the foreseeable future.
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Image via Columbia University Earth Institute
