Life and Death on a Remote Pacific Reef: Lessons in Resilience

Dr. Cobb is a professor at Georgia Tech and director of the Global Change Program there. She is a lead author of the IPCC AR6. She reconstructs tropical interannual climate variability with speleothems and corals, and is particularly well known for finding that ENSO variability has significantly increased in the 20th century.  Her group’s mission is to uncover the mechanisms of global climate change, both natural and anthropogenic, in order to inform projections of future climate change. They focus primarily on the generation of new high-resolution records of past tropical Pacific climate variability from corals and cave stalagmites, with an emphasis on the last decades to centuries. Through the thoughtful combination of climate models and data, They seek to characterize natural climate variability in this region and identify climate trends that are associated with anthropogenic climate change.