Florida’s Coral Reef Is Disintegrating

[osmanthus]

Hey here's one for you Yanquis! You can now get in on the fun too!

You know that nice big barrier reef off the coast of Florida? It's dissolving. Yes, that's right: dissolving.

The ocean up your way is now so acidic that Florida's big reef is literally melting away. Now. All the time. No bleaching required. It will continue to dissolve until either the reef has vanished, or ocean acidity is decreased.

Florida’s Coral Reef Is Disintegrating

Florida’s coral reef, the only tropical reef in the continental United States, is disintegrating faster than scientists predicted and in a way that will accelerate as the oceans become more acidic, according to new research published Monday.

University of Miami scientists called the collapse of the reef’s limestone framework, a critical habitat for fish, “unprecedented” and “cause for alarm.”

“Lots of scientists think that ocean acidification is not going to be a problem until 2050 or 2060,” says Chris Langdon, a marine biology professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “This is happening now. We’ve just lost 35 years we thought we had to turn things around.”

Read the rest on the link.

[Jet Black]

The ingenuity of the market will solve this problem.

[osmanthus]

It already has. The reefs will vanish all by themselves now. Problem solved.

[Worldtraveller]

Start dumping tons of baking soda into the gulf?

[Helium Squeal]

At times like the Permian-Triassic extinction event and more recently the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum how did corals manage to avoid extinction?

[Testycalibrated]

Luck.

[RAFH]

I'd note this isn't actually a heat thing, but acidity. Yeah, the heat intensifies that acidity.

[osmanthus]

At times like the Permian-Triassic extinction event and more recently the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum how did corals manage to avoid extinction?

Permian-Triassic isn't relevant. Corals that build with aragonite (like modern corals) didn't evolve until the mid-Triassic, and even then they were rare for millions of years. Pre-Triassic corals were not closely related to modern corals, and built with calcite. Yes, calcite is still a form of calcium carbonate, but it's a different form and has different chemical properties. So pre-Triassic corals relied on different chemistry to modern ones in at least one obvious aspect, and probably in other aspects as well.

Regarding the PETM, a quick search hit:

Decline of coral reefs during late Paleocene to early Eocene global warming

Here we document the impact of early Paleogene global warming on shallow-water carbonate platforms in the Tethys. Between 59 and 55 Ma, three discrete stages in platform development can be identified Tethys-wide: during the first stage carbonate platforms mainly consisted of coralgal reefs; during the second – transitional – stage coralgal reefs thrived only at middle latitudes and gave way to larger foraminifera as dominant carbonate producer in low latitudes; finally, during the third stage, newly developing larger foraminifera lineages completely took over the role as main carbonate-producing
organisms in low to middle latitudes.

We postulate that rising temperatures led to a stepwise demise of Paleocene coral reefs, giving way to an unprecedented expansion of larger foraminifera, dominating Tethyan platforms during the early Eocene.

So yeah, looks like they were badly affected. Some species may have been more resilient than others. Also, given that the early Scleractinia didn't build reefs, and only evolved that capability later, it may be that there were non-reef-building Scleractinia still hanging around, and they later evolved reef-building abilities.