Fluorescent Growth Bands in Corals from South Florida and their Environmental Interpretation [Draft]
Halley RB and Hudson JH. Fluorescent Growth Bands in Corals from South Florida and their Environmental Interpretation [Draft]. In Halley RB and Hudson JH (ed): 7th International Coral Reef Symposium
Annually banded coral skeletons offer a valuable source of high-resolution proxy for the magnitude and frequency of oceanic and atmospheric processes. The accuracy of ages assigned to skeletal growth bands is critical to interpreting climate processes in the tropics during the last several centuries. Few methods are available to verify the consistency of annual increments beyond several decades of growth. The scleractinian coral Montastrea annularis , from southeast Florida, contains fluorescent marker horizons that provide an independent verification of age assignments by band counting. Crossdating with fluorescent markers indicates that there is no significant disruption in growth among these corals for 150 years and that band counting provides age assignments with errors of less than 1%. Environmental perturbations that result in the loss of a year's growth, such as severe coral bleaching, are rarely recorded in this species and were not encountered in the past one and one-half centuries.
- Type
- Conference Proceeding Paper
- Authors
- Halley, Robert; Hudson, J
- Units
- BISC
- Keywords
- Animal Studies, Boulder Star Coral (Montastrea annularis), fluorescence, Impacts, Indicator Species, Pollution, Runoff, sclerochronology