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Was Britannic, Titanic ’s sister ship, always doomed? The largest ship in the world sank in less than one hour in 1916 without explanation. It rested silently 400 feet beneath Greek waters until Jacques Cousteau located it in 1975. It took another 20 years for advances in underwater exploration to allow more than brief glimpses into the ship’s mysteries.

Determined to learn the truth, pioneering divers extracted tantalizing clues during a series of daring expeditions. Richie Kohler, of Shadow Divers , takes us back to the fateful day when Britannic sank and behind the scenes of 40 years of searching as he helped reveal the truth.

Richie Kohler is one of only four men in the world who has been to RMS Titanic and has dived inside her equally tragic sister ship, HMHS Britannic. His passion for technical scuba diving and maritime history began in 1980 and he is internationally known for exploring some of the most challenging and dangerous shipwrecks in the world. His explorations have helped to locate and name numerous lost vessels, including the mine laying submarine U-215 on the Georges Banks off Nova Scotia, and the WWII destroyer USS Murphy that was crushed and forgotten in the New York approaches.

It was a six-year effort to identify an unknown WWII German U-Boat as the U-869 that catapulted his diving career into the world of television and documentary filmmaking. The daring risks he and John Chatterton took and their dogged determination to seek out the truth of the U-boat, are detailed in NY Times best seller, Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. Additionally, the PBS program NOVA won an Emmy for their documentary, “Hitler’s Lost Sub”, on this same topic. Kohler co-hosted 56 episodes of History Channel’s, “Deep Sea Detectives”, and he has worked on numerous film projects for Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, CBS, PBS, and the Discovery Channel. It was this work that led Kohler to history-making expeditions to the legendary Titanic and Britannic. He has joined an elite, small group of divers and maritime historians who are committed to revealing the truth of why Britannic sank three times as rapidly as did Titanic.

Kohler also trains technical divers, has written the foreword for, The Basics of Rebreather Diving by Jill Heinerth, penned articles for technical periodicals, and been the subject of dozens of radio and television interviews.

Richie Kohler's Website, and Mystery of the Last Olympian site

El Nino events drive intense floods, droughts and temperature extremes all over the world, resulting in massive coral bleaching and mortality on reefs worldwide. However, it is still unclear how the frequency and intensity of these events will change as global climate continues to warm.

In her talk, Diane discuss how we can use corals to study how ocean temperatures and El Nino events have changed in the past and elucidate how they might change in the future with continued warming.

Diane Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Boston University's School for the Earth & Environment. Although Diane grew up in Minnesota, she developed a deep passion for the ocean during childhood snorkeling trips at Buck Island, US Virgin Islands. Diane attended Florida Institute of Technology and graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelors of Science in Marine Biology in the spring of 2006. As part of her undergraduate course work, she studied the reef ecosystems of the Bahamas and the terrestrial and marine ecosystems of Australia. Her thesis researched focused on the relationship between the frequency of thermal stress events in the past and the severity of coral bleaching during recent warm periods.

Diane Thompson's website