Coral reefs support 25% of all marine life around the globe, and while those in the Gulf of Mexico might be less known and less popular among tourists than other reefs, they serve as important barriers to storm surge, lessening the impact of dangerous hurricanes.
In a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, LSU geography and anthropology professor Kristine DeLong and her team of researchers used coupled climate model simulations as well as studies of fossil corals to describe how climate change will impact reefs in the Gulf of Mexico in the not-so-distant future, LSU announced.
DeLong and her team are among the first to produce climate projections specifically for the Gulf of Mexico.
In an effort to learn from history, DeLong studied fossil corals from the last interglacial period—between ice ages—when the Earth was 11% warmer in the Northern Hemisphere and there was a greater loss of Arctic sea ice, with sea levels up to 6 meters higher than they are today.
“We are all very concerned about our coral reefs,” DeLong said about herself and her collaborators at the University of Texas at Austin and Rice University in Houston. “We wanted to get the perspective of what happened in the past, how reefs have responded to changes in climate.” Read the full story about DeLong’s research.
