For our research we are using corals as climate archives to look at environmental changes in the ocean. You can read more about the details here.
To get the corals there are two options. Either we take samples from living species underwater or we take samples from corals that were already taken out.
In 1967 the government of East Germany had the idea to recover an entire coral reef and ship it to Berlin as part of an exhibition in the Museum of Natural History. So, around ten men went to Cuba to take out 70 boxes filled with corals and send them home. 52 years later, some of those corals have never been truly unpacked, we decided, together with the Natural History Museum, to give those corals a second life and use them for our research. These corals can help us to gain a better understanding of how the ocean environment has developed before 1967. These results, together with new corals from Cuba, can help to reconstruct the development of the water temperature but also acidification of the surrounding waters.