UAlbany paleoclimatologist Sujata Murty is an assistant professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences. Sujata explains how her team extracts centuries of climate history from coral skeletons, what these natural records can tell us about future conditions and how we can put this knowledge to use to bolster global climate resilience.
In this episode, Sujata walked us through what coral cores can reveal about past climate and how they can help us forecast future conditions.
She also went further, explaining what natural climate archives can tell us that other environmental monitoring methods miss, and how bringing together different types of natural archives surveyed on land and at sea can give scientists a stronger foundation for shaping global climate policy.
Host: How far back do climate records extend, and how do measurements taken with instruments compare with natural archives like coral?
Sujata Murty: The answer to that question is tricky because it depends on where you are in the world. The short answer is that our best observations come after satellites started getting launched into space starting in the early 1980s. That was the moment that opened up a huge opportunity for us to collect global data very frequently and at a very fine resolution, down to the hour or minute. Before satellites, we were reliant on people actually putting instruments out in the ocean or going by ship and scooping up a bucket of water and sticking a thermometer in it and measuring temperature, for example. That was much more sporadic. It would depend on when ships were moving through the water. So, whaling ships or military ships or merchant ships might collect that data, but it was geographically inconsistent and followed where the ships were going anyway.
In the regions I study, there's virtually no reliable information before the 1980s. In the Atlantic Ocean and in parts of the Pacific, we've done a better job of observing those regions for the last hundred years. But in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian seas, the Maritime Continent, there is very little, lower quality data before the 1980s. So, although it exists and you can download it, those records require us to take more time to check whether they are reliable or accurate. Often they are not.
One of the unique things about corals is they give us data points every single month. So they're comparable to our satellite data, but they also extend the satellite record back a few hundred years. But because they only go back a few hundred years, they also have their limitations.
Host: You're now part of a new international research collaboration trying to fill in that missing data. What sorts of natural archives are you taking into consideration?
Sujata Murty: In this project, we're synthesizing the coral records with other paleoclimate archives like speleothems, which are cave deposits. You might have heard of them as stalactites or stalagmites if you've ever toured a cave. We’re also going to bring in data from tree rings and marine sediment records. Bringing this information together will take us back over the past couple millennia so that we can understand how the monsoon is migrating and moving between the northern and southern hemisphere over these longer time scales, and what does that mean for rainfall and the distribution of rainfall across the tropics?
We're synthesizing the climate archives, and we're also working with modelers. As paleoclimate scientists, we can reconstruct how climate has changed, but we can't so easily understand and pinpoint why it's changing that way. That's where we really need to work with modelers who can help us understand what's driving the change we reconstruct in our records.
Sujata’s work was featured in “Oceans of Time,” a photo series from The Synergy Project that paired scientists with artists to bring ocean research to wider audiences. The images in the project were taken during Sujata’s dives in the Indonesian seas and Pacific Ocean.
In 2020, Sujata joined the McMullen Museum of Art’s programming for “Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives,” an exhibition that put contemporary art in conversation with climate science.
Sujata discussed how her love of the arts shapes the way she studies geochemistry and communicates about climate change on the PBS show A House for Arts.
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photo by Justin Ossolinksi
Hosted and written by Erin Frick
Host (00:02):
Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Erin Frick in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
Sujata Murty (00:16):
It's not a hard sell. I think my research lends itself to attracting students. Someone told me I could get paid to scuba dive, and I tell students, I'm very honest, that was how I got into this originally; I wanted a job that paid me to scuba dive. Who doesn't want that? So that's how it started and it's going great.
Host (00:33):
Long before satellites probed earth from orbit, before weather buoys reported conditions across the open ocean, nature was already keeping meticulous records of our changing climate.
Trees famously count passing years in their rings. Lakes stack them in muddy layers of sediment. Caves write them in stone, drip by mineral drip. Corals also do their part, keeping tabs inside their stony skeletons.
Bolder corals can become massive, reaching heights that would bump against the ceiling of an average room. As they grow, they incorporate the chemistry of the seawater around them into their calcium carbonate layers. Over time, that skeleton acts like a diary, logging information about ocean temperature, rainfall, currents, even pollution.
Sujata Murty is able to read that diary.
At UAlbany, Sujata is an assistant professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences and co-directs the Paleoclimate Lab. She's also a certified scientific and rescue diver whose fieldwork has taken her under the swell around the world to collect cores from coral skeletons.
Growth bands along the length of each core are visible under x-ray. These bands mark time with fastidious precision, down to the month. By analyzing the composition of these bands a millimeter at a time, Sujata's team rebuilds centuries of climate history, sharpening the models we use to predict what's ahead.
Sujata's research focuses on the Indo-Pacific, a region home to 60% of the world's population where life is governed by a climate system called the Australasian monsoon. The system shapes water supply, harvests, and entire economies. Yet, in the scheme of the global climate record, the Indo-Pacific is woefully data-deficient. This makes it difficult to accurately understand how climate is shifting and what needs to be done to sustain life in the region going forward.
With a team of international collaborators, Sujata is filling that gap.
Before she ever picked up a coral drill, Sujata trained in opera. Today, she sings with Albany Pro Musica, teaches students that to be a good scientist, you should also be a good storyteller, and is actively building new projects that bridge science and art.
In this week's episode, Sujata explains what corals can tell us about the climate ahead and underscores why science communication needs to be more than just clear.
Here's our conversation:
Host: Tell me a little bit about your history, your path, and what led you to earth sciences.
Sujata Murty (03:08):
Yeah, my history has been a very winding road. I went to boarding school for three years in high school to be an opera singer, but in addition to that, I had to take all of the academics to get a high school diploma. And I loved my biology and ecology and STEM classes even back then. So, I had kind of this split between my love of the arts and my love of STEM topics and classes at the time. And I ended up getting a bachelor's in geology and biology, but continued to sing in the top college choir and had this kind of side passion for the arts. I think at some point I just realized it was a passion and a love of mine, but not necessarily something I wanted to make a career. I loved being outside. I loved these classes I was taking that were bringing me out into nature and helping me experience the world in a different way.
When I was a freshman, I took a class called “The Geology, Biology and Politics of Coral Reefs,” and that's when I found my love for corals and for ocean science. And I went up to the professor and asked to work in his lab. I'm still working on those cores today in my current research program. And so it just kind of was following my gut and doing what felt good and it landed me here.
Host (04:19):
So now at UAlbany, you co-lead the Paleoclimate Lab. And for starters, I wonder if you could just give us a definition of what paleoclimate refers to.
Sujata Murty (04:27):
Yeah. So, paleo climate refers generally to thinking about how climate has changed in the past. So, paleo means past and climate is climate. The reason we care about that is that if we want to understand and anticipate future changes in climate as we're experiencing the climate crisis and these changes very rapidly right now, we actually need to put that in the context of how the climate system varies naturally. And that can happen on seasonal timescales with summer and winter, which we experience every year here in Albany, but it can also happen on 10-year timescales or changes that happen every 40 to 50 years or 100 years or 10,000 years. And so we really need the geology and that perspective of past climate change to disentangle what's natural about the climate system versus what are we as humans doing to change that system and what is that going to mean for us in the future?
Host (05:15):
What is it in a coral sample that could tell you that there was natural change going on or that there was a change that happened because of human activity?
Sujata Murty (05:25):
So, I personally think that corals are the most exciting, what we call climate archive, which is kind of a recorder of climate. As they live and grow and exist in the ocean, corals grow continuously for hundreds of years at a time, or at least they can. The kind of coral I study is a boulder coral. If you're in a typical room in a house or a building, the corals grow taller than the height of the ceiling in most buildings. As they grow, they incorporate the chemistry of the seawater that surrounds them into their skeleton, and that chemistry changes in concentration and in character based off of changes in temperature or rainfall or ocean circulation or pollution. And the only living part of the coral is the outermost few millimeters. They're actually colonial animals, so they are made up of thousands of different little coral polyps that can be a millimeter wide each. So tiny, tiny little corals that all live together in this boulder colony. And so when we take these cores, we're not actually hurting or killing the coral because the only part that's alive is that outermost part.
What we're extracting is its skeleton and it lives and survives beyond when we collect our samples. And so what we have in the lab is that skeleton, and so it's very preservable. And so we keep these cores for decades, if not longer. So they're passed kind of generationally across the families of scientists so that as we have different research questions or as instruments become better equipped to analyze smaller sample sizes or different chemicals, we can go back and ask new and different questions. So they're highly valuable. It takes a lot of effort and money to get them, and so we keep them for as long as possible.
Host (07:03):
I wonder if you could sort of paint a picture of what studying corals and studying coral cores looks like. I mean, beginning from how do you actually collect a sample to how do you process it in a way that you can run tests and then ultimately arrive at data that feeds models?
Sujata Murty (07:18):
It starts in the most exciting way possible, which is scuba diving in the tropics off of beautiful tropical beaches. To do this work, you actually have to be quite trained in scuba diving. I have a specific scientific diving certification and rescue diver certification so that we're safe in the water. We take drills that are powered by seawater pressure underwater while we're scuba diving and drill cores from the middle of these coral colonies. And we're doing this all while we can't talk because we're scuba diving underwater. And so there's a huge element of communication and remembering which sample came out first and which way is up for each sample and all of that kind of has to happen in a creative way. We take all of that material back to our labs and then we go through a very long process of sub-sampling the coral.
It starts with x-raying the coral, which we do down at Albany Med.
I take my undergraduate and grad students down there. Corals are actually a lot like tree rings. They grow these annual bands that we can use to count backwards in time. So if we measure the chemistry of a specific point in the coral, we can say that's the chemistry from May of 1990 and then compare it to April of 1990. And so we can establish this time scale for our data much like we can with tree rings. And so we use the x-rays for that. We use them to help us figure out where to sample. And then we spend many hours in the lab. We have these manual benchtop drill presses that are fitted with dental drill bits. They allow us to drill these tiny powder samples every one millimeter down the length of these cores that are typically three meters long, let's say. So that's 3,000 samples that we're collecting for one coral record.
We then have to divide that sample up for different analyses. So the students have to weigh every single sample multiple times and then we analyze them. This is work done by both my undergraduate and graduate students now here at UAlbany. It can take years to generate a full multi-century record, and that's one of the reasons why climate research is so slow sometimes is because there's a lot of effort to make sure that we trust the data and that we're producing high quality data.
Host (09:21):
I know that your work has spanned various areas of the globe. Could you walk us through that geography, just sort of how your research has shifted across these different water bodies over time?
Sujata Murty (09:33):
I was lucky enough to get a job offer right after getting my bachelor's and I went to Singapore to work as a lab assistant. I meant to stay there just for a year and come back to the States for grad school, but ended up loving my advisor and employer at the time and decided to stick around to work with her for my PhD. And so, the research I started with was focused in that part of the world.
My first corals were from the Indonesian seas, which is the water in between the Pacific and Indian Ocean near Southeast Asia. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that part of the world, which we call the Maritime Continent. I use the corals to understand how temperature and fresh water have moved from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean because it turns out that that has huge implications for local and regional climate like the monsoon system, but also global climate like El Niño and La Niña cycles, which is in the news all the time right now because we're experiencing a super El Niño that's going to impact all of us worldwide this year.
I've since expanded, moved across to the other side of the Indian Ocean. I now have a full-blown research program in the Red Sea, and there, we're trying to understand similarly, how has climate changed ocean circulation and what does that mean for the hydrologic cycle in the Middle East? That's a desert region, so any amount of change in water moving from the ocean to atmosphere changes flooding, changes droughts, those kind of severe weather impacts. And my dream, which I'm working on now with an NSF proposal, is to meet in the middle and study the Central Indian Ocean and see how all of these different peripheral regions connect and transmit these climate signals across the Indian Ocean.
Host (11:08):
How can the work that you're doing impact people directly in the region affected by these changes in terms of knowing what to expect for the future or informing emergency preparedness?
Sujata Murty (11:18):
My favorite example of this is some of my early work from the Indonesian seas. I was very lucky to get to work with Bali and the Balinese government. I got to go there a lot. That's where my field research was focused. But before we even collected the corals and were doing the work there, I spent a couple years building relationships with the Balinese government and explaining why our research would help them and why it was important. And they were really excited about working with us because they wanted to know: how are monsoon rains going to change in the future? And the reason they care is because they're hugely agricultural in terms of rice. So, they have a lot of rice production, both to feed their population, but also as an economic resource. And so, they wanted to make sure that they were timing the planting of their rice paddies at the appropriate moments in the year to maximize production and not to lose their crops.
Host (12:09):
In terms of the state of the field that you're working in now, what is a major open question that you'd like to see answered?
Sujata Murty (12:18):
One of the reasons I'm so focused on all of these regions we talked about, the Indian Ocean, the Indonesian Seas, the Red Sea, is that that's one of the most under-observed tropical ocean regions on this planet for many, many reasons. It's hard to get out there. It's not where we originally focused. There are lots of countries that border the Indian Ocean, so you have to think about what they want and what they're focused on.
I think that my interest is supporting this idea of we need to understand changes in the monsoon, changes in this huge, what we call the Australasian monsoon system that spans the Indo-Pacific. And the reason is that 60% of the global population is impacted by this monsoon system. I know we're over here in the United States and we have a lot of things impacting us here, but 60% of all of the people on earth live in that region dominated by this one monsoon system.
And yet, it's a part of the world that's incredibly understudied, even though it disproportionately impacts so many people. I would really like us to focus on understanding and being able to better predict changes in the monsoon. That's a huge area of research for many, many people, and there are many people working to understand that, which is awesome. But I think we can do a lot more with going to these parts of the world where we have not traditionally focused and really supporting researchers and research happening in those regions.
Host (13:36):
If you had a policymaker in front of you that had some sort of say over policy that affects climate, what would you want them to take away from your research or findings you've had so far?
Sujata Murty (13:47):
I think I would want them to really appreciate that this is a global problem. I graduated from Oberlin. I went to Singapore and I had the opportunity to do my very first research cruise in Micronesia. And we went from island to island in Micronesia to do the same kind of coral drilling work. And so, every time we would go to a new island, a small contingent of us would get off the ship, go to the island and meet with the chief of the island. And I remember there was one island in particular where we went and the chief of the island asked the chief scientist of our crew, what can we do to stop this from happening? The Micronesian islands are inches above sea level. They're very, very flat, very low lying, and they know that sea level is rising and they know that that threatens their island community.
And that's heartbreaking because it's a global problem. There's nothing that they can do individually to stop global sea level from rising and inundating their islands. And so in terms of policy, really appreciating that there are people being disproportionately impacted who cannot stop this and need solutions and need adaptations sooner rather than later. And that's not just true in the Pacific Ocean. There are certainly plenty of coastal communities in the United States that are now facing flooding and rising sea level that's threatening the infrastructure of our coastlines.
Host (15:06):
Here at UAlbany, you teach a course on science communication. What compelled you to create that course and what do you hope students take away from it?
Sujata Murty (15:13):
I knew I wanted to develop this course from the moment I was hired here. I think that science communication is one of the most important skills that we can teach our graduate students and that we can work on ourselves as scientists. We learn in our training how to speak to other scientists with high levels of jargon, but that's not really helpful in how we communicate with most people. And I don't even just mean the public, I mean across scientific disciplines.
Climate change is a very interdisciplinary problem and we need to be able to communicate with one another, but we also need to be able to inspire and get people motivated to care. And I think that we can do a lot better as a climate scientist community in working on those last two things, inspiration and motivation.
So I wanted to teach this class to challenge our graduate students in our department, not just to be learning the technical jargon and analysis skills for their research, but learning how to get people fired up, to want to care, to want to know, to want to learn more so that they have an audience for the cool research that they're doing.
And so they do that both through learning how to give a high level conference scientific presentation to the department, but they also work with the New York State Master Teacher Program to develop K-12 curriculum and outreach activities to work with the public, and they learn a little bit about media training and what it means to be on camera and communicate much more broadly to a public audience.
Host (16:34):
I wonder if you could point to an example or a tactic that you found particularly effective in filling in that inspiration piece, like something that could generate excitement more than just deliver a message.
Sujata Murty (16:45):
I think there are kind of two things for me. One is that I view science as storytelling. I think that's true for communication outside of STEM research as well, but we are storytellers and we can do that with scientific accuracy, but we can also craft a narrative that's compelling and exciting and not just here's the data, let me tell you what it means. We can make it interesting. I can tell you about my time in Indonesia and what I saw when I was in the field and then talk about the data and what it means. And that's way more interesting to listen to than just the technical jargon.
I think the other thing is having some level of vulnerability and empathy in how we communicate, recognizing that we are humans that experience things as are our audience and that they may come to these presentations with their own fears or knowledge about climate and to honor and acknowledge that, to acknowledge what is the real implication of what we're talking about and what it means for you.
So often when I give outreach talks, I'll talk about the fact that we just experienced our sixth global mass coral bleaching event, and that's what the public cares about. That's what they're afraid about. And they want to hear how is my science informing and related to that.
Host (17:49):
You decided to go into earth sciences, but you did not leave music behind. It's still very much a major part of your life. And I'm wondering just what sort of projects you have in the works currently in terms of your own artistic endeavors and ways you might be working now to bridge that with science.
Sujata Murty (18:05):
Yeah, so I have a couple things that are pretty early on in the planning phase that I'm very excited about. One is that I am working with the UAlbany Art Museum. We're working toward maybe five to seven years from now having an exhibit on campus that showcases my research and the research of the department in visual ways. And so what that looks like is still to be determined, but it would be working with visual artists. So we have to communicate our science to these artists who will then create in their own medium or specialty what that means emotionally for them and what that means scientifically. So it's kind of this balance of communicating the science while also making sure that we inspire and connect emotionally to the audience who might go to the museum.
And the other project I have going on is that actually from one of my classmates from high school, he is a well-established composer and choral conductor, and he is going to commission a choral piece for me, choral, C-H-O-R-A-L, for me to perform hopefully with a choir one day because I sing specific to my choral research. So this idea of choral and choral is something I've thought about since I was about 20 years old, and so I think it's finally going to happen. I actually sing in Albany Pro Musica here in the Capital Region. I've never talked to them about this, so they don't know, but I hope one day they would be willing to work with me on that and actually have the Albany Pro Musica group perform whatever this piece is that gets commissioned.
Host (19:31):
I'm wondering if there's anything about your work and experience as a musician that informs the work that you do in your lab or any kind of connections there.
Sujata Murty (19:41):
Yeah. I think there's a lot more overlap than people necessarily think about on a day-to-day basis. When I was training to be an opera singer, I was learning how to perform and how to communicate and how to connect emotionally. And that's a lot of what we've talked about so far. And so when I teach, when I give talks, when I give outreach, when I train my students in the lab, all of that is using the same communication skills that I learned as a performer. The way I speak changes based off my audience, the way I emote or interact changes based off of what I want to communicate and what level of detail. And I think that really has come from my music training and I'm so grateful for that. I also think that it has allowed me to keep a level of creativity and an open mind when I've been analyzing my data and thinking about how to visualize it in research papers.
I've worked with so many visual artists. I've had so many opportunities to interact with people across tons of different art forms, and that's helped me think about new and exciting ways to see data and visualize data. So that's been really cool and something I hope grows in my career.
Host (20:49):
That was Sujata Murty, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science in UAlbany's College of Arts and Sciences.
In this episode, Sujata explained how she uses coral cores to understand past climate and predict conditions of the future.
In part of our conversation that didn't make the final cut, she offered a deeper take on what we can learn from natural climate archives that other forms of environmental monitoring can't tell us and how by studying them in concert, scientists can strengthen recommendations to inform global climate policy. For more on that, check out The Longer Version in our show notes.
If you missed last week's episode with UAlbany historian, Kendra Smith-Howard on the dirty history of cleaning up, be sure to check it out.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including for this episode, Scott Freedman, who provided audio production and editing from the UAlbany Digital Media Studio deep inside the podium tunnels.
We'll be back next week with another quick conversation about something interesting.
I'm Erin Frick here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.
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