With only two days to find and extract a sample from one of the oldest coral colonies in the world, Konrad Hughen finds himself at the bottom of the ocean with a broken drill bit.

Konrad Hughen is a Senior Scientist in the department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). He received a double B.Sc. in Biology and Geology at the University of California, Santa and was awarded a NASA Graduate Research Fellowship, leading to his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Konrad was also awarded a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, which he pursued at Harvard University before joining the scientific faculty at WHOI. As a geochemist and paleoclimatologist, Konrad’s research interests involve the development and application of proxy indicators for reconstructing climatic and environmental change, focusing on materials from modern coral tissues to centuries-old coral drill cores. His investigations have taken him all over the world, including recent expeditions to Micronesia, Red Sea, Maldives, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines and Cuba.

This story originally aired on June 7, 2019 in an episode titled “Underwater.”

Story Transcript

I’m kneeling on a coral.  I’m literally on my hands and knees, alone underwater on top of a giant coral colony.  I’m surrounded by my equipment but nothing is happening.  Everything is quiet.  Justin is up on the boat and I’m down in the lagoon trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. 

I study climate change.  I’m a paleoclimatologist.  And I was leading an expedition to Micronesia to study the West Pacific Warm Pool.  The warm pool is a giant blob of hot water that the trade winds blow into the Western Equatorial Pacific and all that heat eventually has to flow to the poles and so it drives a lot of the ocean and atmosphere circulation around the world. 

I've always pictured it as a beating heart.  It’s fluctuating with the seasons and it is driving circulation out into the far reaches of the world.  And understanding how it’s changed in the past, whether or not it has predictable beats, rhythms of its own, it will tell us about, potentially, if we know how it has behaved in the past then we know how it may respond to human-induced climate change in the future. 

And to study past climate, I use drill cores from coral colonies.  Corals look like brightly-colored fuzzy rocks or maybe branching trees but they're actually colonies of millions of tiny polyps in a thin skin over a limestone skeleton that they have secreted continuously as they grow.  And as these corals grow, they deposit density bands that are just like tree rings.  So when we take a core, we can count those layers back through time and determine how old they are.  Then we do chemistry on the limestone and that can tell us about past temperature and past salinity and river run-off and lots of different things. 

I know that we are not supposed to touch corals.  And if you do touch corals, especially in the same place day after day then, yes, you can do damage and you can kill those polyps on the surface.  But we don’t spend a lot of time on the coral and we do take a core, and those polyps unfortunate enough to be living right in the circle that we take home will find their maker. 

But we do plug the holes that we drill with cement corks, with cement plugs and the corals will grow back over those plugs, four inches across, in a year-and-a-half.  Those scars will be healed completely and you'd never know that we were there. 

In this case, because of the logistics this trip to Micronesia, we weren’t able to make it to the most important site until the very end of the trip.  Kapingamarangi.  I love saying that.  Kapingamarangi Atoll.  Kapingamarangi is the southernmost atoll in Micronesia and it is closest to the center of the warm pool and that was our target site.  We had gotten some good cores from other sites before this but none of them were that large.  In some cases, there were not big colonies that we could find.  In some cases, the colonies had been deeply undercut on the sides or they had dead patches on top or they had crevices and cavities inside from burrowing worms and clams.  There's a lot of things that can mess with what would be a perfect coral record and so I was really, really nervous about getting…

We needed a record from Kapingamarangi.  It was key to the scientific mission of the whole expedition.  I was really nervous about whether we were going to find something.  We only had two days.  Finding colonies is actually one of the hardest parts of all of this work.  I’m pretty good at psyching out where corals - how they think - and I can usually find the patch of giant corals in a given area.  But it can take me days so we always, if it’s possible, we always invoke the help of the local fishermen.  They know the reefs like the backs of their hands.  Many times, I've had individuals point and say the largest colony on the island or in the country is right there.  And it is.  We motored over it in order to come to the village and talk to them, so that’s always a huge help. 

And in Micronesia, every single island that we came to, I would go and meet with the elders and meet with the chief and ask for permission to study their coral reefs.  And they were incredibly helpful.  They were open and friendly and they were excited that we were working on the corals.  They wanted the coral reefs to be studied.  They were incredibly sophisticated in their knowledge.  These are islands without metal or concrete, in many cases. 

And they knew about climate change and they knew that sea levels were rising and they had been observing erosion on their own islands.  So that was a big deal. 

At Kapingamarangi, the son of the chief took us out.  We went out into the lagoon and he took us to where he knew the large corals were, and there were many.  It was a beautiful garden of large coral colonies, and one in particular was just beautiful.  It was twenty feet tall, shaped like a gumdrop.  No cavities, no burrows, very, very smooth, perfect shape with a flat top, and I was ecstatic.  I thought we’re in business.  This is it because we found the colony that we need and we’re going to succeed.  We’re going to get what we want.  I’m going to get what I want. 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Taking a coral core is difficult.  It’s hard work.  The drill rig is this big, steel beast like a jackhammer and we take the cores in sections so there's a lot of work and it’s heavy.  And when you're far down, when you're 10, 15 feet down the hole, you need to be using your senses.  If the core breaks and starts to crumble into rubble, that will kill the hole and you won’t be able to go any farther so it’s very intense. 

When I’m in the middle of it, and especially down deep doing this dentistry with steel bars like rebars, it’s crazy, I’m so focused I lose track of what’s around me.  I've had colleagues ask me, “Did you see that manta ray that was floating over you?”  And I had no idea.  So that does happen. 

But in this case, this core we started working with it, we started drilling and it was behaving beautifully.  It was not brittle.  Nothing was breaking.  After a while, we were pretty far down and everything was going smoothly.  I thought, again, we’re really going to get it.  This is happening and I couldn’t have been happier. 

Then the drill stopped moving.  This happens all the time.  The drill turns off and usually it’s something very short.  I stay in the water and my research assistant Justin goes up on the boat and he might change the fuel, he might make short adjustment, and then bubbles start coming out of the end of the drill again and I'll be back drilling before he can even come back down into the water. 

But I wait.  So in this case, I stay down on the coral and Justin goes up on the boat, but time drags on and the bubbles don’t come back on.  I start to realize slowly that this is going to be one of those bigger problems, which wouldn’t be the end of the world except that we have two days and so we can’t afford this kind of delay.  So I start to get this creeping dread.  My chest turns cold and I want to throw up, which is not fun underwater. 

So here I am, sitting on the coral underwater, waiting for news from above, which isn’t coming, and time is dragging on.  And, possibly, I’m underwater, I’m breathing slowly and can’t hear anything so I start to enter a meditative state.  I’m thinking about where I am, of course, and I can picture the earth and I can picture the warm pool rising expanding and contracting and changing size.  And I can see the beating heart of the earth and the warm pool and I can picture Kapingamarangi in the middle of that, right at the center of it.  And I can picture the lagoon at the heart of Kapingamarangi with this coral right at the center which is recording everything.  It’s aware of and watching and writing down everything that happens in its skeleton. 

Then things start to get weird.  The coral that I’m sitting on looks like a heart and I've got both of my hands on it thinking about the heart of the earth.  I start to feel like I’m holding the earth’s heart in my hands.  I’m holding Mother Earth’s heart and she's holding me.  I’m surrounded in this warm embrace of Mother Earth and it is completely overwhelming.  It is real.  I’m in the presence of something much, much, much larger than myself. 

And it’s not just a moment.  It’s going on and on and I realize how incredibly lucky I am to be where I am, to have had the opportunity to come to this place and see these lush coral reefs and to meet with these people, sometimes 150 people on an island, who live a life that is so different from mine.  And how incredibly important and special this opportunity was to be in this place. 

I don't know how long I sat there.  At some point, I came to my senses and remembered that I’m underwater and I’m breathing from a scuba tank.  So I slowly come back up to the surface.  I’m not worried about the drill anymore.  I am very thankful for what we've already gotten from the other cores that we've gotten.  And it’s not about the cores.  I’m grateful for the experience that we've had.  And I’m no longer worried about what’s going to happen.  I am willing to accept whatever we’re given. 

Maybe it’s because of that.  I don't know.  But of course, everything worked out.  We fixed the drill and went back the next morning.  We were able to take a core right to the bottom of the largest colony and brought back an incredible record that extended 400 years and has given us a lot of great information. 

But that coral core was not the most important thing or the most valuable thing that I brought home from that trip.  Not even close.