Corals and Coral Reefs
Shallow water tropical coral reefs have long been recognised as important archives of information on past environmental change. In particular, study of ‘fossil’ reefs and corals has been used to help reconstruct tropical climates and changes in relative sea level. In this talk I will focus on modern and Quaternary reefs, illustrating some of the exciting opportunities that exist for research than crosses disciplines and helps address some of the outstanding issues in environmental sciences. We will look at how annually-banded reef building corals may be used to investigate variability and change in the El Niño Southern Oscillation and other aspects of tropical climate that have near global repercussions. This will include a look at how combined palaeo and climate modelling studies may be used to help address questions about likely future trends. We will then examine the ways in which individual corals, and coral reefs, may be used to reconstruct the rate and timing of sea level changes on timescale ranging from years to hundreds of thousands of years. This will draw on recent and ongoing Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme work on submerged coral reefs in the Pacific. Finally, we will discuss how analysis of corals and coral reefs may be used to assess the impacts of climate and environmental change on these organisms and ecosystems, including the impacts of current warming and ocean acidification.
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Speaker
Sandy Tudhope, University of Edinburgh
Biography
Sandy Tudhope is a Professor, and Head of the Global Change Research Group (www.geos.ed.ac.uk/research/globalchange/) in the School of GeoSciences at University of Edinburgh. He has over 25 years of research experience on modern and Quaternary reefs in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and Caribbean. His main research interests involve using corals and coral reefs to reconstruct past climate and environmental change, but he also researches the factors that control the growth of corals and coral reefs, and sedimentary processes occurring on and around coral reefs. Over the past 10 years he has focussed on using analysis of the annually-banded skeletons of massive reef building corals to investigate the nature and drivers of tropical climate variability and change through the late Quaternary. Much of this work has centred on the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon, and has involved fieldwork from the Galápagos, through the central and south Pacific islands, to Papua New Guinea in the far west. He has also worked on using corals and coral reefs to reconstruct past sea level changes, and he is involved in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme Expedition 325 to drill submerged reefs on the Great Barrier Reef (early in 2010). In his talk, Sandy will draw on his research experience to illustrate how analysis of corals and coral reefs may be used to improve our understanding of the nature and drivers of climate and sea level change, and he will explore how such information may be used to help constrain future predictions.
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