In a breakthrough study published today in Science Advances, researchers at UH Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) Marine Ecological Theory Lab reveal that coral reefs are creeping toward the poles in response to warming oceans, but the pace is too slow to beat the heat and escape impacts of climate change.
In a breakthrough study published today in Science Advances, researchers at UH Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) Marine Ecological Theory Lab reveal that coral reefs are creeping toward the poles in response to warming oceans, but the pace is too slow to beat the heat and escape impacts of climate change. The study also offers a hopeful alternative: immediate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can significantly improve the future outlook for coral reefs globally.
“As the ocean warms, species tend to move poleward,” explains Dr. Noam Vogt-Vincent, a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at HIMBʻs Marine Ecological Theory Lab and lead author of the study. “We know from the fossil record that coral reefs have previously expanded their ranges in response to past climate change, but we didn’t know whether this was a matter of decades or millennia.”
To predict changes in coral reef distributions, the team turned to sophisticated simulation models run on the University of Hawaiʻi’s Koa supercomputer.
“It is impossible to investigate future coral range shifts entirely experimentally, because these shifts take place over very large distances and long timescales. A computer simulation approach is the only way to predict this,” notes Vogt-Vincent.
Read more at University of Hawai'i
Photo Credit: joakant via Pixabay
