By Kelly Donovan

Initial interest

Throughout my life, I’ve always been interested in the environment, climate, weather, and the physical aspects of the Earth. I knew I wanted to pursue research that would let me dip my toes into a topic that was underrepresented, so when my research mentor provided me with a path that involved analyzing deep-sea corals, I couldn’t refuse.

Deep-sea corals and missing data

Figure 1: Photograph of a coral reef ecosystem.

Corals are stationary and fragile animals living in the ocean that serve as habitat for about 25% of fish species. Unlike the colorful shallow-water corals many people picture, deep-sea corals can live hundreds or even thousands of meters beneath the ocean’s surface. One special characteristic of corals is their slow growth rates , often just a few millimeters per year… keep this in mind, we’ll return to this later.

Unfortunately, deep-sea corals are underresearched compared to shallow-sea corals.…