Washington and Lee University
In 2009 Professor Greer and students Salley Gould (2010), Kat Telfeyan (2010), Catherine Reed (2011), and Joe Stockmeyer (2011) traveled to Barbados to investigate whether salinity anomalies associated with Amazon River water plumes could be detected as far north as Barbados. With permission from Barbados authorities we collected water samples and several cores from living Montastraea sp. and Siderastrea sp. corals in shallow waters off the west coast of the island. After sample preparation, the students traveled to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science where they worked with PhD candidate Lila Gerald to x-ray the core slices, and the University of Miami Stable Isotope Lab where they conducted geochemical analyses with Dr. Peter Swart and his graduate student crew. The preliminary results of this work were presented at an American Geophysical Union meeting in December 2010.