Biologist Michael Miller Joined MIT Team Coring Lakes in Central Pacific

Professor Michael C. Miller, a veteren on many paleoclimate coring operations to the New World tropics and Galapagos, combined limnology with a high tech coring team from MIT headed by Julian Sachs. The goals were to examine the extent, magnitude, and frequency of el Nino events in the central Pacific on the remote islands of Kiratiba, called Christmas Island and Washington Island by the British. Christmas Island was target for over 35 H-bomb and nuclean bomb tests between 1957 and 1963. The team cored 5 lakes on Christmas Island and traveled over the high seas aboard the 50 foot Fanning Island Trader to Washington Island, that boasts the only freshwater lake in the central Pacific. "We sampled 100 lakes to examine the use of heavy water and Dueterium-rich algal and bacterial lipids to correlate with salinity, which varied over 4 orders of magnitude from la Nina to el Nino events," explained Miller. "We found that the ITCZ has moved South of 4 N latitude in the past 3000 years to cover Washington Island with more than 3 meters of rain, and is litte affected by el Nino events."