Frenkel ’16 Paper on Deep Sea Coral Published in Academic Journal Archives

Frenkel is the lead author on a paper recently published in the journal Deep Sea Research I. Research for her paper, “Quantifying bamboo coral growth rate nonlinearity with the radiocarbon bomb spike: A new model for paleoceanographic chronology development,” was done with the help of co-author Hannah Miller ’17; LaVigne served as senior author. Also involved in the project were colleagues Tessa Hill at UC Davis, and Ann McNichol and Mary Lardie Gaylord at the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility (NOSAMS) at Woods Hole.  LaVigne said Frenkel successfully used radiocarbon dating techniques to reconstruct how corals grow, “and she found out that the growth rates of these corals slow down as they get larger. Previously it had been thought they grew at a constant rate. This is a critical finding for paleoceanographers who use these corals as climate archives,” she continued, “as it allows us to interpret our climate records with a more precise timescale. And because this advances our understanding of how bamboo corals grow, it helps us measure how quickly deep sea coral habitats might recover from damage.”  Learn more at…