Publications by authors named "Philipp M Spreter"
Article Synopsis
- The warming of waters is severely affecting zooxanthellate corals globally, causing high mortality rates and raising concerns, especially for Cladocora caespitosa, the only reef-building coral in the Mediterranean Sea.
- Monitoring efforts have been limited, making it difficult to understand past marine heatwaves (MHWs) and their long-term impacts on coral health.
- Through sclerochronology, researchers examined coral growth patterns and found a correlation between temperature and calcification, but a decline in growth and calcification rates in warmer waters suggests increasing physiological stress due to MHWs.
The Oman upwelling zone (OUZ) creates an unfavorable environment and a major biogeographic barrier for many coral reef species, such as giant clams, thus promoting and maintaining faunal differences among reefs on the east and west side of the Arabian Peninsula. We record the former existence of Tridacna in the Gulf of Oman and review its stratigraphic distribution in the Persian Gulf to provide new insights on the connectivity of coral reef habitats around southern Arabia under changing climate and ocean conditions. Fossil shells were carbon-14 dated and employed as sclerochronological proxy archives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe skeletons of stony corals on tropical shallow-water reefs are high-resolution climate archives. However, their systematic use for unlocking climate dynamics of the geologic past is limited by the susceptibility of the porous aragonite skeleton to diagenetic alterations. Here, we present oxygen and carbon isotope time series (monthly resolution) from reef corals with an unusual unaltered preservation from the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO) "hyperthermal" (40 million years ago).
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