Coral skeletons: storage and recovery of environmental information
- 1 December 1996
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Global Change Biology
- Vol. 2 (6) , 569-582
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.1996.tb00068.x
Abstract
Understanding the nature and causes of past global change is a key to understanding what may happen in the future. The discovery, nearly 25 years ago, of annual density bands in skeletons of long‐lived, massive corals promised high‐resolution proxy climate records for tropical oceans. The tropics are regions of major importance to the global climate system and they are poorly represented by high‐resolution proxy climate records such as tree rings, ice cores and historical documents.In this review we examine the principles and procedures underlying routine recovery and interpretation of information from proxy environmental recorders. We summarize an extensive literature which indicates that coral skeletons are excellent archives for considerable and diverse environmental information. We show that this potential has not been fully realized, largely because corals seemed to yield inconsistent, sometimes conflicting, information. We discuss ways in which much of this confusion is resolved by new understanding of coral skeletal growth mechanisms. We also examine several records which indicate that corals can meet requirements for reconstruction of useful, reliable environmental information.Keywords
This publication has 34 references indexed in Scilit:
- On the inclusion of trace materials into massive coral skeletons. Part II: distortions in skeletal records of annual climate cycles due to growth processesJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1995
- Interpreting High-Resolution Proxy Climate Data — The Example of DendroclimatologyPublished by Springer Nature ,1995
- Ice records of the past environmentScience of The Total Environment, 1994
- On corallites apparent in X-radiographs of skeletal slices of PoritesJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1993
- On the nature and causes of density banding in massive coral skeletonsJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1993
- Systematic variations in the depth of skeleton occupied by coral tissue in massive colonies of Porites from the Great barrier reefJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1992
- Computer simulations showing the likely effects of calix architecture and other factors on retrieval of density information from coral skeletonsJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1990
- Density measurements and the interpretation of X-radiographic images of slices of skeleton from the colonial hard coral PoritesJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1989
- The nature of skeletal density banding in scleractinian corals: fine banding and seasonal patternsJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1989
- Variations in skeletal architecture associated with density banding in the hard coral PoritesJournal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 1988