Scientists Find Heat-Tolerant Coral Reef Near Laura in Majuro Lagoon

Anne Cohen, a 62-year-old scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, identified a heat-tolerant coral reef offshore the community of Laura in Majuro lagoon during an April 2026 visit. The reef showed live colonies of tabletop and staghorn corals after most other Majuro reefs bleached during the 2024 El Niño event.

Cohen began the Super Reefs project in 2018 and launched a joint initiative with The Nature Conservancy and Stanford University in 2021.

The project targets locations where governments already plan marine-protected areas, including the Marshall Islands. More than 80 percent of the world’s reefs have been affected by the current global bleaching event across at least 83 countries and territories, and the world has already lost more than half of its coral reefs.

To locate resilient sites, Cohen worked with Woods Hole oceanographers Weifeng Zhang and Yan Jia to model a decade of temperatures, currents, and wave energy across the 100-square-mile Majuro lagoon.

Temperature loggers and current sensors placed by the Marshall Islands Conservation Society showed water near Laura ran nearly two degrees hotter than most of the lagoon. Stanford University’s Resist, Recover and Rebuild group, led by Stephen Palumbi, tested coral fragments from the site in a dockside lab using picnic coolers, aquarium heaters, chillers, and temperature controllers.

The fragments were exposed to controlled heat bursts that mimicked low-tide extremes.

Experiments ranked the Laura corals among the toughest in heat tolerance. Findings were presented to Laura residents to support creation of a locally managed marine area. The effort follows the Reimaanlok process, a community-led framework coordinated by Alicia Edwards of the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority.