Kelly: Good evening.
We're pleased to have you join us
for our annual Seaside Chat speaker series
about ocean topics associated with Flower Garden Banks
National Marine Sanctuary and the Gulf of Mexico.
This year, we are also part of the National Marine
Sanctuary webinar series
hosted by NOAA's office of National Marine Sanctuaries,
as well as the NOAA's science seminar series.
During the presentation,
all attendees will be in listen only mode.
You are welcome to type questions for the presenter
into the question box in the bottom of the control panel
on the right hand side of your screen.
This is the same area you can let us know
about any technical issues you may be having.
We will be monitoring incoming questions
and technical issues,
and we'll respond to them as soon as we can.
We are recording this session and we'll post the recording
to the National Marine Sanctuaries
and Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary websites.
We will notify registered participants via email
when these recordings are available.
And for those of you who are interested,
we provided a classroom lesson
called Coral Cores: Ocean Timelines,
as well as a document of links
to additional resources on today's topic.
These items are available in the handout pane
of the control panel.
Simply click on them to download them.
The Seaside Chat speaker series
began as a way for Flower Garden Banks
National Marine Sanctuary to share current research
and management efforts in the Gulf of Mexico
in an informal setting.
These chats started in 2012 with presentations
in the gift shop of the Galveston Fishing Pier.
And then from one year to the next,
we moved around the Galveston Texas community
hosting presentations at Moody Gardens, Texas A&M Galveston,
Texas Seaport Museum, and Sea Star Base Galveston.
In 2020, we brought the presentations home to our offices
at historic Fort Crockett
just before the world shut down for a pandemic.
Although we have offered webinar connections
during our live events for many years,
it wasn't until 2021 that we went completely virtual,
and joined forces with the National Marine Sanctuary
webinar series.
In all that time,
our Seaside Chats only missed one year, 2019,
which makes this our 10th year of presentations.
We've chosen to recognize this milestone with a new graphic.
We hope you agree with us
that this comfortable chair by the sea
captures the essence of our program.
Hello everyone, my name is Kelly Drinnen
and I'm the education outreach specialist
for Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
I'm not at my usual place today.
Today, I'll be facilitating the webinar
from the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian islands,
where I've been personally checking up on things
associated with next week's topic, Humpback Whales.
Due to this,
I have some issues is with my internet connection
from time to time.
So today I also have with me, as usual Leslie Whaylen Clift,
our constituency affairs coordinator,
and Leslie will be helping me
with the backend administration of this webinar
and then filling in for me
should I have any difficulties with my internet connection.
50 years ago,
the United States ushered in a new era of ocean conservation
by creating the National Marine Sanctuary System.
Since then, we've grown into a nationwide network
of 15 National Marine Sanctuaries
and two Marine National Monuments
that conserve more than 620,000 square miles
of spectacular ocean and great lakes waters,
an area nearly the size of Alaska.
These marine protected areas
are kind of like national parks and national forests,
but under water.
In celebration of this 50th anniversary,
we are running a save spectacular campaign
across the entire sanctuary system.
A way to remind everyone just how special these places are.
The National Marine Sanctuaries Act
gives NOAA the authority to designate
special areas of the marine environment
as National Marine Sanctuaries.
It also mandates
that the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
conduct research, monitoring, resource protection,
education outreach, and management
of America's underwater treasures
to preserve them for future generations.
In addition to being places for recreation and research,
National Marine Sanctuaries are also living classrooms
where people can see, touch, and learn
about the nation's great lakes and ocean treasures.
This webinar series is just one part
of that national education and outreach effort.
Today's Seaside Chat series
is hosted by Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary,
the only National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
This sanctuary consists of 17 banks,
or small underwater mountains,
that are home to some of the healthiest coral reefs
in the world, amazing algal/sponge communities
and deep reef habitats featuring
an abundance of black coral.
The original sanctuary designation
took place in January 1992,
meaning that we just celebrated our 30th anniversary
a few weeks ago.
As you can see,
2022 is turning out to be quite the anniversary year!
Today's presentation focuses on the stories
that the skeletons of living corals can tell us
about climate history.
The skeletons of massive corals grow in layers,
similar to tree rings,
that can be counted to determine the years of growth.
Scientists can look at the chemistry of each of these layers
to see what the water temperature was
when that part of the coral skeleton was growing,
as well as other indicators of environmental conditions.
By stringing together these yearly skeletal records,
scientists can chronicle how the ocean
and the coral reef have changed over time.
Our speaker today will tell us how she uncovers
what the corals can tell us.
Today we welcome Dr. Kristine DeLong
to talk about her work in paleo-oceanography
and paleoclimatology.
Dr. DeLong joined the department of geography
and anthropology at Louisiana State University
in August 2009, after completing her PhD in Marine Science
at University of South Florida
and her post-doctoral research
at the US Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Dr. DeLong has expertise in paleo-oceanography
and paleoclimatology with 17 years of research experience.
Her research is focused on climate change of the past,
primarily in the tropics to tropical regions,
subtropics to tropical regions for the past 130,000 years.
Current projects include investigating shifts
in sea surface temperature and ocean circulation
in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea
using the chemical variations
of the skeletons of large boulder size corals,
which can live for many centuries.
Her coral reconstruction from the Dry Tortugas,
the westernmost Florida Key,
is a 274 year long temperature record.
She has also published a paper on the past, present
and future of coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico.
Her newest project funded by the National Science Foundation
will build coral based temperature reconstructions
for Veracruz, Mexico,
Flower Garden Banks in the Northern Gulf of Mexico,
Haiti, Dominican Republican,
Dominican Republic, excuse me,
Virgin Islands and Little Cayman Island.
And she will work with researchers at University of Oklahoma
on comparing these results to climate models
to better understand past and future climate change.
She is also the lead principle investigator
of an exciting project, just funded for phase II,
investigating a bald Cypress swamp forest
found 13 kilometers offshore of Alabama
in the Gulf of Mexico,
assumed to be uncovered by a hurricane.
These trees grew during the last glacial interval,
70,000 to 50,000 years ago,
when global sea level was more than 20 meters
lower than today.
Welcome, Kristine.
Kristine: Thank you so much.
So sorry, I got unmuted myself and I'll turn on my webcam.
Kelly: That's quite alright.
-: All right.
Kelly: All right, and Leslie,
please hand over the sharing...
-: All right.
Kelly: There we go. Perfect.
-: So we should be all set.
Kelly: Yes. Take it away.
-: All right, thank you so much for having me
and I'm excited to show some of our latest work
through the pandemic these past two years.
So I'm excited to show this work
and my cover slide here, this is from Flower Garden Banks
almost 10 years ago
when I had a wonderful opportunity to go out there
and dive this beautiful coral reef.
And the work that I'm gonna show you
is a combination of lots of different people involved
in the research
and I'll go over the acknowledgements at the end
but I do want to mention that
lots of people have been involved in this project,
along with our funding agencies that support this work.
So you may have seen
graphs like I'm showing here,
that shows the temperature change over the last 1,000 years.
And in this we'll see that part of this last 1,000 years
is covered by instrumental records.
But before that,
this information is all coming from paleo climate records.
And I'm a paleo-climatologist and we study the past
so we can use that as a key to understand the present
and the future.
And this is important when we start to think about
what's happening on our planet for the last 100 or so years.
So how do paleo-climatologists do our work?
We use natural archives
and we look for particular archives that have layers in them
so that we can use that to figure out where we are in time.
And many of you may be familiar with tree rings,
where we can count the rings in a tree
to figure out what year it is.
So we have lots of different natural archives
that have similar layers in them that we can use.
So one you may be familiar with is ice cores.
And ice cores have layers in them
that we can count to figure out where we are in time.
And these ice cores also contain little
air bubbles in them
that are time capsules of what was happening
in the atmosphere in the past.
And by looking at long ice core records,
we can directly measure
how much CO2 is in the atmosphere in the past,
but also the temperature of these locations in the past.
And this gives us these really nice long records
of the ice ages for the last 800,000 years.
So we know that CO2 and temperature move lockstep
with each other.
And I'm gonna show this graph for another reason.
We're only here today on the far right.
This is our present conditions.
And I'm gonna take you back in time through the Holocene
and we're gonna go all the way back to the last interglacial
by the time we get to the end of this talk.
So let's go back to corals,
'cause this is the natural archive
I use for a lot of my work.
And the reason we use corals
is they have layers in 'em as Kelly mentioned
that we can use to count and go back in time.
So to see these layers,
you have to take an x-ray of the coral skeleton.
So we go out and take a core
and once we get the core back to the lab,
we cut a slab out of it.
So we take that core, we cut it up
like you're slicing bread.
And once we get that slab,
we can expose it to an x-ray device
and we can now see in this x-ray image, these layers.
And each one of these white bands here,
this is denoting that we've switched a year.
So we can use these layers within the coral skeleton
to figure out where we are in time.
Now, this gives us a lot of tools that we can use
to reconstruct past environmental conditions.
So we like to use corals because they grow continuously
and they grow for many centuries.
And this gives us these really nice
annually resolved records
that we can use for our reconstructions.
So the primary tools I use in my research
as we look at the chemistry in the skeleton,
so we look at isotopes and we also look at trace elements
because as the coral's growing,
it's recording what's in the water around it
and also its environment.
So every year that coral skeleton gives us a natural archive
of what was happening in the ocean
at the time that coral was growing.
And we can do this with live corals.
We prefer to use the massive boulder shaped corals,
'cause these are the corals that live the longest.
We can also use dead or sub fossil corals
to go back further in time
to investigate what's happened with past climate
and the environment.
So the study sites that I've been working on
the past 10 years,
all around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean,
and I'll be working in these same locations
for probably the next 10 to 15 years,
so today I'm gonna talk a lot about the work we've done
at Flower Garden Banks.
I'll also show some data from Dry Tortugas
and some new results we have from the Cayman islands
and also Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
So one of the things I'm doing
as part of our National Science Foundation work
is building this network of reconstruction
throughout this whole region
so we can understand what's happened
with climate variability in the past 125,000 years.
Now, another project I've been involved
in the past three years
is the Anthropocene Working Group.
And this group is looking for a geological record
that geologists can use as a marker for the Anthropocene.
And the Anthropocene is the time period
where humans have changed the earth
to the point where we can now recognize it
in the geological record.
So the potential markers we're looking at
with the Anthropocene Working Group
is the burning of fossil fuels.
And we see as we get into the late 20th century,
we get this rapid increase in black carbon emissions.
We also have billions and tons of concrete
and plastics that have been produced
that are also changing the environment.
But the Anthropocene Working Group
are really starting to lean towards
looking at the nuclear bomb testing.
And what we see worldwide is this doubling
of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere that starts in 1955.
We're also looking at plutonium spikes
so all products of these nuclear testing.
And we see this in lots of different archives
around the world.
So hopefully when we get to the end of this project,
we will be able to update the geologic time scale
with a new epoch of the Anthropocene.
Now we've got several locations that are being examined
as potential global boundary locations
for this Anthropocene marker
and Flower Garden Banks is the one I'm working on
and I'm gonna show you some of the results
from this project.
So first let's go back and look at
how we're doing our coral work.
So here's photos from coring some large corals
down in Dry Tortugas.
So this was back in 2008.
We also work with corals that have been uplifted in Haiti
during the earthquake that happened in 2010.
So these corals are actually out of the water
due to that earthquake.
And we recovered pie slices out of these corals to work on.
We also work on fossil corals
that have been washed up on the beaches.
This is a photo from Little Cayman,
where we're coring some of these fossil reefs back in 2018.
And once we get these corals back to the lab,
we're gonna slice them like bread, start taking our x-rays
and we'll start working on our chemistry.
So in the laboratory, once we get the x-rays,
we figure out our years, we'll go in with our micro mill
and we can go in with tools that are a lot like
a dentist drilling your teeth.
And with these tools,
we can go in very precisely onto the coral skeleton
and start to extract powders from the skeleton
where we know what year,
we can get really close to the month
and start to reconstruct these chemical histories
of what happened to this coral going back through time.
So we use lots of different chemical proxies.
And we call 'em proxies
because these chemistries tell us something about
an environmental variable we're interested in.
So what I use quite a bit is the strontium calcium ratio
in the coral
and this ratio, the strontium,
replaces calcium in the coral skeleton,
and that relationship is driven by temperature.
We also look at oxygen isotopes,
so the stable oxygen isotopes.
And these will vary in water with temperature
and also with the delta 18 O value of the seawater itself,
which changes due to salinity.
So by combining delta 18 O and strontium calcium
we can start to reconstruct what's happening with salinity
in the ocean as well.
We have other chemical proxies we use.
So barium calcium is one I'll show you some data from today.
We also have other temperature proxies
that we're actually in the process
of running these samples in the lab this week.
So magnesium, lithium, and uranium.
We also look at rare earth elements
that tell us something about dust and wind.
We also look at carbon isotopes,
which tell us about cloudiness and productivity
and some other things.
And we can also use other dating methods,
which we need to do for our dead corals,
that we did not core live.
So we can use uranium-thorium dating and radiocarbon dating.
And uranium-thorium dating is very precise.
So we can get down to the half year to a hundred years
on those dating precisions with that particular method.
So that's how we do what we do with our coral chemistry.
So this just is some photos of my lab here at LSU.
We have our instrumentation to measure
these trace elements in the lab.
We also have a new water isotope analyzer
that we will start doing oxygen isotope measurements
in seawater.
And I have some folks or some pictures here
of our students working in the lab,
either weighing out samples or working on the micro-mill
extracting samples from a coral skeleton.
So just to kind of orient you to
some of the data that I'm gonna show you,
it's from a coral from West Flower Garden Bank.
So it's at about 60 feet of water depth
on the north side of the west bank.
And here's some photos from that coring trip back in 2005.
And this is the top of that coral we've been working on
for the past two years.
So I've had multiple students and colleagues,
sampling this coral,
doing different types of reconstructions
that I'm gonna show you the data from.
So first let's look at our Anthropocene markers.
So this is some new data we got in December
from our radiocarbon results.
And with this sample, we've now gone to annual samples
and we're looking at that radiocarbon spike that occurs
as we start to have more nuclear testing going on
in the atmosphere.
So you can see in the graph it's quite flat.
So we get to 1955
and then we start to see the sharp increase
that really starts to move up after 1958,
once the nuclear testing really starts to take off.
When we get into the late 1960s,
the nuclear test bans come into play
and atmospheric testing stops.
And we start to see this decrease after the 1970s.
So this is one of the markers
the Anthropocene group is very keen to use
for their geological marker.
And that's because we see it in a lot of locations
around the world.
And Flower Garden Banks nicely shows this marker.
So not only in our Siderastrea siderea coral,
but we also see it in other coral species
in Flower Garden Banks,
but also down in Vera Cruz, Mexico as well.
Now another marker we see for the Anthropocene
in this coral from Flower Garden Banks
is in the carbon stable isotopes.
And that's the data I'm showing you here.
And what I want you to notice
is that there is a large decline
over 69 years of data that I'm showing you here.
And this decline is also seen if we look at global,
or sorry, carbon isotope measurements from Mauna Loa
and the South Pole.
So what we're seeing in the atmosphere
for our carbon isotopes is also being recorded
in our geological record,
our coral from Flower Garden Banks.
So we're seeing for the same time interval from 1980 to 2005
a 0.9 per mil decline in Flower Gardens.
So we're getting a good geological record now
with what's happening in the atmosphere.
So you may be wondering, well, how does this work?
Where is this being driven by?
So these carbon stable isotopes are changing
because we are taking fossil fuels out of the ground
and burning them.
And these fossil fuels have been long buried,
and they have very negative carbon isotope values.
And as we burn the carbon,
the carbon stable isotope signature in the atmosphere
and the oceans is changing and it's becoming more negative.
And as we extend this back in time,
we see that this coincides with the industrial revolution.
So another proxy we're looking at at Flower Garden Banks
is barium in seawater.
And this is work we started just as the pandemic
was coming in.
So I had an international student, Mudi,
He's sitting there in Sri Lanka
on top of a beautiful fossil coral.
So he came to LSU in February
and we got about a month's worth of lab work done
before we got shut down by the pandemic.
But we started to see some really interesting results
in the barium.
So we have this bottom section from 1930 to about 1945,
and then there's a break in the record.
And then we pick it up again in 1975 to 2005.
And comparing these two intervals,
there is a mean shift of about two micromolar per mol.
And this is a pretty large shift for this type of record,
especially for means.
The other things we noticed
is that there's this really robust seasonal cycle
that's not expected in a location that's not close to land,
it's not near any large rivers.
It's out in the middle of the Gulf.
So we've been really trying to figure out
what's happening with this increase
in barium that happened over time
and what's driving the seasonality we're seeing
in this coral record.
So where does barium come from?
So one of the main uses of barium is a mineral called barite
and it's used in drilling muds.
And about 90% of all the barite
that is mined in the US winds up offshore
being used for oil drilling.
And it's thought that barite
would stay dissolved on the sea floor
and just be discarded there.
But we may be seeing evidence
that this barite is not staying on the sea floor,
that it's actually dissolving and changing the chemistry
in the Gulf of Mexico.
And our corals are recording that.
So again, we have lots of oil platforms
out in the Gulf of Mexico.
So this is one that used to be close to Flower Gardens.
I believe it's now been decommissioned and removed.
And this map just shows you all of the oil platforms
in US waters, that's all the blue dots,
and then also in the waters down in Mexico,
the red and green dots.
So we have lots of oil wells and oil exploration
going on in the Gulf.
So if we go back and look at what we see in our coral record
and compare it to the US production of barite
and keep in mind most of this is going offshore
to be used for drilling muds,
we see this nice comparison.
So the earlier part of the 20th century,
that 1930s interval,
we have low amounts of barium in our corals,
and it doesn't correspond
to anything we're seeing with barite production.
But as we start to get oil production in the Gulf of Mexico,
we get this really sharp increase in barite production.
And when we look at our coral record,
the coral is tracking this increase in barium as well.
And then once oil prices drop
and oil production declines in the Gulf,
we see that sharp, that same sharp decrease
in the coral barium calcium, as well.
So we're linking the two of these together,
that we are seeing an increase in our barium in sea water
in the Gulf of Mexico.
And this is being driven by the drilling muds.
And there's just the markers there
to show you how large these differences are.
So coming back to seasonality with the barium.
So the Gulf, we have some different things going on.
In the winter time, we have quite a bit of phytoplankton
that are very active in the winter
and it decreases in the summer.
So when we have a lot of phytoplankton in the ocean,
this drives down the nutrient levels in the surface water
and also decreases barium.
So if we look at chlorophyll records from satellites,
for the area around Flower Garden Banks,
and compare that to our coral barium calcium record,
what we see is as we get this increase in chlorophyll,
and I flipped the axis on the chlorophyll graph here.
So going down is more chlorophyll more plankton,
which is drawing down the barium calcium.
So we see that decline in the barium calcium.
So this shows us that our coral record
is also recording what's happening with productivity
in the Gulf of Mexico, as well, as we go back through time.
Now kind of switching gears to a different proxy that
we use, that's the strontium calcium,
where we can reconstruct sea surface temperatures.
So this is that top section of the core from 1930s to 2005,
where we're getting really nice reconstruction
showing the seasonal temperature variability
in the Gulf of Mexico,
and also what that variability looks like.
And I'm gonna come back to this record in just a minute.
I also wanted to mention, we're working on right now,
extending this record from 1930
all the way back into the 1700s.
(indistinct)
Lovely picture there,
where we're putting all of this information together.
And in the next year, she's gonna have a really fabulous
temperature reconstruction for Flower Garden Banks
completed.
And one of the things I can highlight
in this reconstruction so far
is we're seeing this decline in temperatures
as we move back in time.
And this interval here in the 1800s has a special name
and that's the little ice age.
And this is where we see in the Northern hemisphere
and in Europe, this decline in temperatures.
It's not necessarily global,
it's more of a Northern hemisphere,
European centric decline in temperatures.
But we are seeing that in Flower Garden Banks as well.
Now, just as a comparison,
this is the reconstruction that I did at the USGS
for Dry Tortugas.
And this reconstruction uses that same temperature proxy,
strontium calcium, and goes back to the 1730s.
So the coral reconstruction is in black.
In the blue is the instrumental air record from Key West.
And you can see that there's a nice correspondence
between the coral record and the air temperature record.
And the dashed line here is showing that average temperature
for the last 30 years of the 20th century.
And looking at this,
we can see that in the Florida,
the westernmost Florida Keys
as we move back to the little ice age,
we do see temperatures dropping and becoming colder.
So almost one degree colder on average.
But we do have intervals where it is in the 1700s
almost as warm as the late 20th century.
And we have quite a bit of interannual variability
and multidecadal variability in this record as well.
So now let's take the Dry Tortugas record
and plot that with what we have from Flower Garden Banks
thus far.
So that 1930s interval to 2005.
And Flower Gardens is in red and Dry Tortugas is in blue.
and Dry Tortugas is further south
so we expect it to be warmer.
And that's what we see in this record
and Flower Garden Banks in red tends to be colder.
We also see that Flower Gardens has a bigger seasonal cycle,
which we expect because it's further north.
The bold lines that I've plotted here,
these are the smooth lines that tells us what's happening
with interannual variability.
So we see a little mean shift between the locations
which we expect,
and it's pretty constant as we go back in time.
They seem to be doing quite similar variability
till we get back to this interval right here
in the 1930s going into the 1940s
where Flower Gardens has these really cold temperatures
compared to what we see at Dry Tortugas.
And this period is interesting
because this is the dust bowl interval,
where the Midwest of the United States
goes through a very dry period.
And how this connects back to the Gulf of Mexico
is that the Gulf is one of our primary moisture sources
for precipitation in the midwest of our country.
So if the Gulf of Mexico is colder,
that means less evaporation and less moisture
going over land for precipitation.
So by pulling these types of records together,
we can start to go back
and look at how these changes in the past
have influenced our weather here on land.
So just to show you that same section of the coral record,
we also have our oxygen isotope data.
Again, this is new data
we're just getting back from the lab,
where we'll be looking at salinity reconstructions.
So our oxygen isotopes also vary with temperature,
and we see that same variability
as our strontium calcium record.
But what's interesting
is as we pull these two records together,
we're seeing some interannual and decadal variability
in the records, as well.
And this is work that I'm doing with Amy Wagner
over at Sacramento State on this project.
So this will be,
hopefully a project will finish up here this next year.
Now we kind of switch gears a little
and we're gonna go back a little further in time
to a period called the medieval climactic optimum.
So this was just before the little ice age.
And you may know this period from history,
'cause this is when the Vikings go and settle
Greenland and Iceland.
And Europe goes through this period
where the temperatures and the climate are milder
and we start to have really good harvest and plenty of food.
They're growing grapes in England.
The winters are less severe,
so this is just this really nice period of time.
And we're interested to know,
okay, so that's what's happening in Europe.
What's happening in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico?
So looking back at our ice core data,
we can look at the medieval warm period,
which is about one to three degrees warmer than today
and we can compare that to the little ice stage
we just looked at
that is one to three degrees cooler than today.
So for this work, we're gonna go to the Cayman Islands.
And this is where we've been working since 2016
going and collecting all of these boulder corals
that get washed up on the beach by hurricanes.
And these boulders,
we can go in and date them using our uranium-thorium dating,
and start to understand what's been happening
in the Caribbean over the last 6,000 years or the Holocene.
So we'll be looking at strontium calcium with these corals,
we'll also be looking at our barium calcium,
which in this location tells us about upwelling
on the north side of the island.
Another project I'm doing with these corals as well
is as we start dating them,
we're seeing we're getting clusters of corals
at particular time intervals.
So you'll notice I've got two here already dated
to about 5,500 years ago.
So this is storm wash.
So we're also gonna be looking at hurricanes
and that's what this map is showing here
is all the hurricane tracks that went through the Caymans,
to try to understand
what's happening with hurricane frequencies as well.
And 5,000 years ago, this is a really interesting interval
where we have less El Nino events
occurring in the Pacific ocean,
which means we have more hurricanes in the Atlantic ocean.
So so far we're seeing lots of these mid Holocene corals
washing up.
But we'll be continuing that in the next couple of years.
So this is some of the data that we've been able to produce.
One of our undergrads at LSU, Kendall, worked on this.
So this is a coral from that Medieval Climactic Optimum.
So it's dated to about 1300 years ago.
And what we see
is slightly cooler temperatures there than today,
but it's quite variable.
So it's cooler, but the temperatures swing quite a bit.
And we're also seeing evidence
of these really strong wind events
that produce upwelling offshore as well.
And this is work we'll be continuing
in the next couple of years.
So now we're gonna go back a little further in time
to the last interglacial.
So here's that marker in the ice core record.
So 125,000 years ago.
And we're interested in this particular interval,
'cause it was the last time the earth was as warm
as it is today.
It's the last time carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
was stronger than 280 parts per million.
The other thing is sea levels were higher than this interval
so by six to nine meters, like 20 feet higher than today.
And that's because more of Greenland and west Antarctica
melted. And keep in mind at this time interval,
there's no humans impacting the climate.
This is natural climate variability
where sea levels got higher all on their own.
So we're also interested in looking at what's happening
seasonally.
We get this really strong seasonal contrast
during this interval
and this is what's expected to happen
with global warming into the near future.
So to look at this interval,
we need to find records
that have that annual seasonal resolution
and they're quite rare when we go back this far in time.
But with corals, we can do it.
So here I'm gonna show you two records
from the north coast of Hispaniola, or Dominican Republic,
and Haiti.
So the first coral I'm showing you, this is the fossil
coral, it's been dated to 128,000 years ago
and it spans 75 years.
And we're gonna compare that to our modern coral
from that uplifted coral from Haiti.
And these corals span about 84 years.
So by comparing these two,
we can understand what was happening
when the earth was as warm as it is today in the past.
So looking at this last interglacial coral,
we see some interesting things.
So we have an average temperature here in blue,
at 27.5 degrees, and it varies by
about 1.6 degrees on a year to year basis.
We also have some really strong inner annual variability,
so about three degrees Celsius,
and strong decadal scale variability
of about two and a half or 2.8 degrees Celsius.
So this may not mean much to you
till we compare it to the modern record.
So there in Haiti.
So the top plot here is the Haiti modern.
The bottom is the last interglacial coral.
And these are scaled to the same temperature for both plots.
So one of the things you'll notice
is that our average temperatures are pretty much the same
for the modern and the last interglacial.
The difference is in the variability.
The modern corals have less variability
and our last interglacial has this really strong,
seasonal plus interannual and decadal variability.
So this suggests that as temperatures rise,
as sea levels go up,
and that seasonal cycle becomes stronger,
we may also see this increase
in interannual and decadal variability
in the Caribbean region.
We can take these results
and compare them with climate models.
And we're gonna to do this with some different simulations
called CCSM3.
And we're gonna look at, oops, sorry.
The last interglacial interval,
we have a control that's the last 270 years
with no greenhouse gases.
We have the 20th century
and then two sea surface temperature records.
And these maps are correlation maps
that are showing
for our location there in Haiti, Dominican Republic
have this temperature representative for the larger region.
And we see that in each of these scenarios,
our particular site is good at recording
what's happening in the Caribbean in general,
down into the Florida keys,
but not really going into Flower Garden Banks.
So the Northern Gulf of Mexico
is doing something different than the Caribbean.
Now when we start teasing
what's happening with the climate models
with our coral record,
we start to see some interesting things.
So here, we're just looking at the seasonal cycle,
and our model simulations,
which are shown here in the purple and red.
When we compare that to the temperature reconstructions
that are also modern, there is a cold biased here.
If we look at what's happening with the last interglacial,
that is the black line, we see that it's also colder
than our modern temperature records,
but it has this greater seasonality,
which we expect for this time interval.
So if we look at the seasonal cycle for the model,
it's about 3.7 degrees Celsius.
Now, if we bring in our coral reconstruction,
we see that same seasonal cycle,
but the difference here is the corals are warmer
than the models.
And they're tracking what's happening
with the temperature observations as well.
So the models are getting the seasonal cycles right,
but there's a cold bias in the climate models.
And this is something that is known for the Caribbean region
in particular.
So it's not for all locations on the earth.
This is a Caribbean intra America sea's problem
in the climate models.
And the reason why
figuring out what's going on with this bias is important
is because we start to think about absolute temperatures
like the threshold for hurricane formation,
which is 26.5 degrees Celsius.
So if we're looking at the models,
they're not quite getting into this warm range.
Whereas when we look at what's happening
in the last interglacial
of our sea surface temperature records,
we're above this threshold for hurricane formation
for a good number of months of the year
where the models don't quite capture that.
So that's important to think about.
The other thing is when we start to think about
corals and coral bleaching,
two degrees change is a big deal
when looking at coral bleaching.
So figuring out what's happening with these models
in the Caribbean is an important part
of what researchers and my research team is looking at.
So kind of just to wrap together
everything that I've shown you here,
so a big part of what we're doing
is looking at these Anthropocene geological markers
using Flower Garden Banks as the candidate location.
We'll be submitting the papers this summer.
The proposals will go to the International
Stratographic Committee.
They will evaluate the proposals
and they will decide which slide will become
the ultimate stratographic marker for the Anthropocene.
And I'm hoping that our work at Flower Garden Banks
will show that this is a really good location
to have the geological marker for the Anthropocene.
We're also gonna continue building on
with all of our coral reconstructions.
So it's very much still a work in progress,
but we're excited about what's happening
and we'll have more results
coming out in the next couple of years.
I've got new students coming to LSU in the fall
and students continuing on.
So there's much more to come.
And I'll end there.
Kelly: Wow Kristine,
that's just some great information there.
At this point,
I don't even know how to address that.
There's just so much information there, so many new things
that even for us and the staff
we've been like kind of chatting in the background
saying, "Wow, that's really cool.
I wonder what that means for the future of our coral reef,"
and so forth.
At this point, we have about 10 minutes
left for question and answer.
If you have a questions for our presenter
you can type them into the question box
in the GoToWebinar control panel
on the right hand side of your screen.
If you've just clicked the question mark
in your attendance box, we're not gonna unmute anybody.
So all questions need to go into that,
type them into the question box please.
Leslie and I will sort through them
and feed them back to Kristine.
And because we only have 10 minutes left,
Kristine has kindly agreed to stay on a little bit longer
with us, maybe an extra 10 or 15 minutes past 7:30
to continue answering questions
if there are enough in there that we need to address that.
But, we will still wrap up at 7:30.
For those of you who have a hard stop at 7:30,
we will do a little wrap up at 7:30.
And then for those of you who want to stay on with us,
you can do that and we will continue on
with a little bit more of a question and answer period.
So let's see what we've got for you, Kristine.
-: Okay.
Kelly: The first question.
When you take a core out of a coral,
how badly does that damage the coral?
-: Good question.
And it's one I actually have people ask me that quite a bit
and I have a little slide prepared.
So this is one of the corals that we cored in Dry Tortugas.
And you can see there's a little patch in the top of it.
So we put a plug in it and we glue that plug in
and that's to protect the coral
so that it doesn't get little bio-eroders
going down into the hole.
What will happen through time
is the coral will actually grow up over that hole.
So if you've ever been out diving
and you've seen little Christmas tree worms in the corals,
so they also bore into the coral
and the coral over time will grow over those
and seal them off.
And with some of our really long coral cores,
we see all these little Christmas tree tubes
that have been grown over.
Same thing happens with the corals after we core them.
So this bottom picture,
this is from Puerto Rico and my lab-mate in grad school,
Hallie Kilborn, she cored this in 2004.
And when they started going down on this particular coral,
and it was a nice big one off the south coast
of Puerto Rico, when they got down about six, seven inches,
they noticed there was this little concave part of the core.
And what happened was they had actually went back to a coral
that Amos Winter drilled in 1992,
and almost hit the exact same spot that he had drilled.
And back in '92,
we don't think he sealed this particular coral,
we didn't see any evidence of a plug in it.
Oops, sorry.
But you can see the coral did grow back over that hole.
And when Hallie was coring this core,
they couldn't even tell from the surface
that it had been cored before.
So a nice healthy coral will grow over the hole
and recover its where you can't see it in the future.
So again, (indistinct) we wanna be really careful
when we're (indistinct) as much as possible.
But good question.
Kelly: Great.
And actually that's a Flower Garden's picture
up there in the top right corner.
-: Yes it is.
(Kelly laughs)
Kelly: Do you think the cycle going colder
versus today, the cycle warming is why there is a cold bias?
-: So here, so there's just something inherent in the models.
So again, with climate models,
they're dealing with grid cells
and those grid cells can be hundreds of kilometers,
hundreds of miles wide.
So when you get into a place like the Caribbean
and the Gulf of Mexico, places like Florida,
you can have Florida in the middle of the grid cell
and it's averaging everything on the west coast
and the east coast of Florida.
Same thing when you get down into Cuba and all the islands.
So you get the Caribbean is being mixed in
with the Atlantic ocean on the north side of the islands.
They just don't quite have that resolution
to get at what's happening at these smaller scales.
So that's pretty much, for areas like the Caribbean
and the Gulf, is an issue.
And a lot of climate models
when you like start looking at the results, oh, sorry,
they'll just kind of blank out the Caribbean
and the Gulf of Mexico and just not show any results
for that region 'cause they know it's a problem area.
But I think as the models get better,
they have finer resolution,
they start to bring in more coastal processes,
understanding what's happening with ocean currents
in the Caribbean and bringing that into the model,
I think these things will start to be resolved.
And we're starting to see some evidence of that
happening already.
But there's lots of climate models out there,
you know, different institutions
all over the world and universities
have their climate models.
I think there's like 27 plus now
that do these types of simulations for the IPCC reports.
So they're getting better,
but we're getting into like diagnosing
all these little tiny problems
and like those of us working in the Caribbean,
we're sitting there going, hey, climate modelers,
pay attention to us because something weird is going on here
and you need to look at it.
And next week I'm actually gonna be doing a seminar
with the INCAR Center, looking at paleo-climate records.
So we'll be doing that all next week
and seeing some of the latest information
coming out of the climate models.
But they are starting to focus on
what's happening on these smaller scales
in the intra-America seas region.
Kelly: Thank you.
Next question has to do with the healing curve
from Mauna Loa.
It says it shows carbon dioxide level increasing
and your graph showed the seasonal fluctuations,
but the overall graph went down.
Was your graph showing something other than carbon dioxide?
-: Yes, it was.
It's showing carbon isotopes.
So yeah.
So this is again, it's easy to get that confused
with the Keeling curve.
So this is looking at carbon isotopes.
So this is carbon 12 versus carbon 13 ratios.
So it's not carbon dioxide.
And what we're seeing with this ratio being driven down
is because of the burning of fossil fuels.
So it looks kind like the Keeling curve,
but it's a different observation.
Kelly: Okay, thank you for the clarification.
Next question.
Have you ever used corals from Stetson bank
to measure temperatures?
Despite being close to the Flower Garden Banks,
Stetson has no reef building coral or very little.
Could this be temperature related?
-: It's temperature related.
There's a lot of the things that go into whether or not
a coral reef will become established.
Water depth is one of them.
Water clarity.
So whether or not there's a suitable substrate
like a hard bank.
Corals like to grow on top of rock.
They don't really like to grow on top of sand.
So you have to have kind of all the right conditions
for corals to form.
So there's lots of banks in the Northern Gulf of Mexico.
We don't get corals on most of them.
There's very few places in the Northern Gulf
that have coral reefs.
We do know there's submerged fossil reefs
as you go over down towards the Padre islands.
Offshore, there are fossil reefs offshore they're dead.
They were alive when you go back to the early Holocene.
So as temperatures and sea levels were rising
after the last ice age,
you did have some reefs forming in other places in the Gulf,
but they ultimately became drowned
and they are now no longer coral reefs.
Like in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,
we don't have coral reefs.
Again, we have the Mississippi River
puts a lot of mud into the water.
When I'm over diving in Alabama,
I mean, we've got like a little window
where we get clear water
where we can see what we're doing underwater,
that's October, November.
Because all the Mississippi River floods,
the Mobile bay stopped flooding
and the water will actually clear up for us
a little bit in October and November.
But it has to be just the right location for corals to grow.
So.
Kelly: Okay. Thank you, Kristine.
That is going to conclude
what we can get accomplished during our original hour.
But Kristine, hang on there,
we'll get back to a couple more questions
that are still out there for you.
Folks, if you need to wrap up, please listen in.
We're gonna wrap up the official part of the programming
and then we'll continue on
with the question and answer period.
Leslie, if you could please go ahead and show our screen
that would be wonderful.
As I said before,
depending on the number of questions remaining,
we will attempt to get them answered after the webinar ends
and we will email out responses.
Please also remember to check out
the links we shared with you throughout the presentation
to help you find more information on your own.
Those links are also shared in that one document available
in the handout pane.
We put all those links there.
So if you weren't paying attention to them
during the presentation,
you can go back and check on them later,
including our Coral Cores: Ocean Timelines activity.
That is a lesson, actually a lesson, not an activity
that can be used in the classroom.
So there's a lot of great information
on the Flower Gardens website
and a few others about looking at corals
through the paleoclimatology lens.
You'll wanna check out some of those websites.
As a reminder, this is the last time
once we get to the end, you won't be able to download those.
So please, if you wanted to download those two handouts,
please do that now.
Next, please.
Thank you for attending the seaside chats presentation
on discovering climate history and coral skeletons.
This is the third in a series of four presentations
we are offering this month.
We invite you to register for the remaining chat
by visiting us on the web at flowergarden.noaa.gov.
We promise the next topic will be just as engaging
and informative as the ones we've already covered.
And I can assure you,
from checking out some Humpback Whales myself this week,
that they are a very interesting topic.
We'll be looking not just at the whales themselves
but the impacts they have on the marine ecosystems
around the Hawaiian islands.
We also welcome any feedback or further questions,
so you can submit input to us
by replying to the follow up email you'll receive
after the webinar
or by emailing us at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
Next please.
Today's presentation
has also been part of the National Marine
Sanctuaries webinar series.
While Seaside Chats last just one month,
our national webinar series continues throughout the year
to provide educators with educational
and scientific expertise, resources, and training
to support ocean and climate literacy in the classroom.
Be sure to check out the website for recordings
of past webinars and a schedule of what's to come.
As a reminder, we will share the recording of this webinar
via the National Marine Sanctuaries
and Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary websites.
And again, links to those are available
in that downloadable handout.
Following this webinar, attendees will receive a PDF copy
of a certificate of attendance
that provides documentation for one hour
of professional development for today's presentation.
This includes our Texas CPE provider number,
for those of you who are Texas educators.
And if you are an educator outside of Texas,
please use this certificate to help get your hours approved
in your district.
If you require additional information,
by all means, contact me at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
There will also be a short evaluation
following today's presentation.
Please complete this survey
immediately after signing off the webinar.
It should only take about three minutes to complete,
and we really appreciate any feedback
you are willing to share.
And again,
thanks to Kristine DeLong for a very great presentation
about Discovering Climate History in Coral Skeletons
and the stories these coral cores can tell us.
For those of you who need to drop off now,
this is the time to do that.
But the rest of you feel free to hang on,
we are going to continue on
with our question and answer session
for about another 10 to 15 minutes.
Ready Kristine?
-: Ready.
Kelly: All righty.
Question is using the chemical structure
of the coral cores before,
has the prediction of future climate change been on mark
or is that still being worked on?
-: So, okay so can we use the coral cores
to project what's gonna happen in the future?
Yes, we're still working on that.
So as I mentioned, there's some disagreements
between the corals and the climate models.
And I do work with climate modelers to figure out,
you know what we're...let me back up.
One of the ways we can improve the climate model
is by looking at the past.
So we gotta give it the data to train itself on.
And the instrumental period is short.
So we don't have maybe a hundred years on land.
In the ocean, those records are really short.
So like finding a hundred years of ocean data is just not,
it doesn't happen in too many locations.
Maybe we have 20, 30 years max.
So the problem is as you get into colder intervals
or warmer intervals in the past,
the models don't have anything to train on
to get their algorithms working right.
So that's one of the things paleo records can provide
is to give them targets
so that they can go in and refine the models.
So what's working with all the different equations
and how they interact with each other
so that they can get the same thing we're seeing
in the paleo record
for these different intervals in the past.
So the last interglacials are a really important one
because we have higher sea levels.
It's a warmer time interval,
so we want the climate models to get that interval right.
And if they get that right,
then they should be able to improve their projections
into the future.
So that's how we work together.
So it's not necessarily the corals are projecting the future
the corals are providing that record of the past
for climate models to train on
and to tweak and make the changes they need to
so that the models are recording the past
as how we see them in the geologic record.
And if they can do that,
then they should be able to also
refine their projections into the future.
Kelly: Thank you.
Next question.
Can cores or skeletons from deeper corals,
greater than 50 meters, help resolve some issues?
-: 50 Meters?
Oh, if there was big ones that deep,
it would be really interesting to see.
We don't normally see the massive boulder corals that deep.
So they corals will start to grow in more of a platey form,
but we can use deep sea or cold water corals.
They tend to be smaller.
Many of them are branching. Some of them are cup corals.
I am working on a project right now with some folks at LSU
on Antarctica cup corals
and these cup corals some of them are 800 years old,
some of them are a couple thousand years old.
So we're looking at them right now
trying to figure out, can we get histories out of 'em.
We don't even know how long these corals live.
They could live for just a couple years.
They could live for hundreds of years.
So we're working on that now.
So yes, we can use corals from deeper waters
where it's colder.
The science is still being established.
There's lots of different coral species,
we're trying to figure out the right ones to use
getting the chemistry right but yeah, hypothetically yes,
it can be done.
And I do have projects right now
where we are trying to do that.
Kelly: Okay.
The next question has to do with the barite signature.
And is it harmful to the corals?
-: Sorry, say that again.
Kelly: Looking at the barite signature.
So, you know, you see it in the corals
and it's telling you what's going on around it,
but is it damaging, is it harmful to the corals themselves?
-: Okay, yeah. So is the barium harmful to the corals?
Barium itself is not per se harmful to corals.
So it's not poisonous.
If you've ever had to go and get like a colonoscopy,
one of the things they have you drink
to clean yourself out is barite.
So again, you don't want to drink or eat a lot of it.
So again, it's like barium per se is not toxic to corals.
So that being said,
there is some folks who've done work with barium
and looking at coral skeletal structure
from an engineering standpoint.
And what they're finding is because barium is a larger atom
than calcium.
So what happens is when you get a lot of barium
into the coral skeleton,
its engineering properties, its strength,
its brittleness start to change.
So what could potentially happen
is as we get more barium in sea water
that barium is getting incorporated into the corals,
it could result in the corals
not being as structurally sound
as they would be if that barium level was lower.
So I think I answered the question.
Kelly: Okay. Sorry, I had a pause in my internet here-
-: That's fine.
Kelly: What are your future research goals and topics?
-: So future research goals.
Oh, I have so many of 'em. That's my problem,
is I have lots of things I'm interested in.
Right now what I want to do is, you know,
finish up all of these Atlantic corals.
We have other proxies we're looking at.
One of them I'm really excited about
is the rare earth elements.
And we can connect that to African dust
and these dust storms that come across the Atlantic ocean.
I think even in Galveston,
sometimes you guys get the dust storms in the summertime,
and if you have allergies, it's horrible.
So understanding the dust storms,
'cause they're connected to the trade winds
and understanding trade winds
strength is a really important climate variable
that we want to try to understand.
And like when I talk to the climate modelers,
I'm always like, what information can I give you
to help you?
And they're like, give me winds.
And I'm like, okay, how do I reconstruct winds?
That's a really tricky question.
But dust is one of those things we can use
to reconstruct what's happening with the winds.
So I can look at wind strength.
We can look at dust sources.
So we know whether or not the dust is coming from Africa
or not.
And that's one of the things we're doing in the Caribbean
with barium is when we get on the north side of the islands,
when you have really strong winds, you get upwelling.
And barium can be used as an upwelling proxy.
So yeah,
so that's one of those kind of like lifetime things
I've been working on is how do I get a good wind proxy.
And we continue to work on that.
We actually did some work on that with those Haiti corals
that I showed you, looking at the rare earths,
but I didn't show it in this presentation.
So yeah, lots of things.
And then I'm still doing the work
with the underwater forest,
which is just an absolutely fascinating project.
I've been working on that for 10 years now.
I'll probably keep working on it for the next 10.
We keep finding new sites.
And you know, trying to understand what's happening
with this basically it's a ice age forest
that's out on the continental shelf
and trying to understand it's, where it occurs,
why it's preserved, where it's located.
So that's a big part of what I do. So.
Kelly: Wonderful.
Maybe we'll have to have you back for another talk
on the underwater forest.
-: Yeah. I Would love it. -: Another season.
All right.
We have time for maybe one or two more questions.
Let's see.
Have you ever compared your coral data,
to other data from tree rings or ice core samples?
-: Ah, great question.
Yes, that is actually another project that I'm working on.
Some, actually people I went to,
friends I went to grad school with.
So I work with Grant Harley
who does tree ring reconstructions.
So he works down in the Florida Keys in Florida
and in Mississippi region.
And I also work with Jason Polk
who's at Western Kentucky University.
And he does cave reconstructions
with stalactites and stalagmites.
So he has a really nice reconstruction
of what's happening with precipitation in Florida,
going back over the last 2000 years.
So as we finish up the Flower Gardens
and the Vera Cruz reconstructions,
we'll be comparing that to the tree ring records
and also to these cave records.
So in Florida, there's some in Alabama as well,
and then also over in Texas
that we'll be pulling all of these together.
So even in Mexico,
there's some really nice reconstructions down in Mexico
and Belize, as well.
So yes, we'll be pulling all these different proxies
together.
Kelly: Wonderful.
Hold on one second.
I gotta reorganize my screen here. There we go.
What is your data predicting in terms of bleaching
for the Caribbean
if the sea surface temperature rises two degrees?
-: Yeah.
Yeah, it's one of those,
I wanna have hope,
you know, corals will find a way to survive.
You know, with two degrees warming, it's going to be,
we're gonna lose some corals.
And it's one of the things that's kind of nice
about diving Flower Gardens
is it's such a beautiful, healthy reef.
And then when I go out to the Caymans,
and Little Cayman is one of the better islands to go
because there's hardly any people there.
The only people who go to Little Cayman is to scuba dive.
And there's nice reefs there,
but you know, a couple of years ago
I went to Indonesia
and we went out and did a little snorkeling trip
and they just took us out to a spot that let us snorkel
and I put my head in the water and I was like,
oh my God, I forgot what a beautiful coral reef looks like
in the Pacific.
There's just corals everywhere.
And they were like, oh, this isn't even our best reef.
So yeah, so I think, you know, for the Caribbean,
it's yeah, it's been degrading for some time.
It will continue to degrade
and it's sad to see
and I hope it doesn't happen.
You hear these anecdotal stories about,
you know, corals are being found
further up the Florida coast,
you know, deeper waters,
we're finding kind of refugia for corals.
So maybe the shallow water corals may not survive,
but in other locations, the corals themselves may survive.
The reefs won't because you lose that structure,
but they may survive in other locations.
And Bermuda is another place I love scuba diving there.
I mean, there you have some really cold waters in the winter
but the corals survive in the summertime
and with temperatures rising, we may have,
you know, the Bermuda may be a refugia for corals, as well.
Kelly: Interesting.
Okay, and we'll make this the last question.
Does dead coral work as well as live coral for your work?
-: It does.
You have to, you know, it's different.
We have to check, you know,
to make sure that the coral's still original skeleton,
so it hasn't started to go thru the fossilization process.
'Cause a fossil itself means that it's original
mineral makeup has changed.
So that's why on my slide,
I put sub fossil because if it's fossilized,
I lose my chemical signal.
So I don't want fossilized corals.
I want dead corals that are well preserved,
but still have their intact original skeleton.
So that's mainly what we have to check for
with the dead corals,
is that they haven't started to go through
this diagenetic process
of the aragonite changing to calcite
and we lose that chemical signature.
So like, yeah, that last slide I was showing was
the Cayman islands, those last interglacial reefs.
And a lot of those reefs
have started to go through that diagenetic process.
The same in Florida.
There's some really nice fossilized reefs all around Florida
but they've already started to go through
that diagenesis process.
So you lose the signal.
Kelly: Well, you've got a fan in Bermuda online
who says that you should come for a visit.
They have great reefs.
And they're doing some paleoclimatology with Anne Cohen.
-: Yes. Yes.
So I know Anne.
Yes, I love Bermuda.
It's been a long time since I've been there.
I'll have to come back and visit again.
Kelly: Wonderful.
Well folks, we are so appreciative of you all
joining us this evening.
Thank you so much Kristine for a great presentation.
As one of our commenters said, "You are a great explainer.
You make all those graphs mean something
to people who don't see that kind of stuff every day."
It was really great, very interesting aspects,
things I hadn't heard about it before,
I just think this was a great presentation
about Discovering Climate History and Coral Skeletons.
And it really is true, corals tell us stories,
both living and dead
and we continue to learn from them every day.
Thank you so much Kristine
and thanks to all of you who stayed on with us.
We had another like 80 or so people that stayed on
for the extra question and answer.
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to join us today.
And this concludes today's webinar.
-: Thanks. Bye.