Steffen Hetzinger

Dr. Hetzinger was a Coral Reef Fellow with CCMI and is a CCMI Research Associate, specializing in geochemistry, geology, and paleoclimatology. Dr. Hetzinger earned a PhD in Marine Geology from Kiel University (Germany) and completed a Postdoctoral fellowship as a Humboldt Fellow at University of Toronto, Canada. He is a Research Assistant at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel since 2010. Dr. Hetzinger ‘s research interests center on the extraction of past environmental signals from the skeletons of marine organisms such as corals by using microsampling techniques and geochemical analysis. Around Little Cayman massive coral colonies can grow continuously for up to several hundred years. Dr. Hetzinger expects that the reconstruction of past natural climate fluctuations from these high-resolution archives provides an important baseline to better understand the dangers of global warming to modern Caribbean reefs. Dr. Hetzinger has published over 40 articles on related to historical coral health and climate events based upon the study of coral and algal records, including four publications based upon research conducted at CCMI.

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