Coral-Based Approaches to Paleoclimate Studies, Future Ocean Environment Assessment, and Disaster Research

Abstract

Global warming causes serious harm to the Earth’s environment. A more sophisticated and accurate climate model can be developed by reconstructing climatic change since the Industrial Revolution and for other past periods of global warming. Coral skeletons are an important archive of past climate changes, and advances in the ability to read sea surface temperature and salinity in the coral record have been made by applying state-of-the-art technology. Coral skeletal climatology has been successfully applied to characterize both the recent global warming trend in the Western Pacific and the mid-Pliocene warming that occurred 3.5 million years ago, and it has also been used to investigate biological and environmental issues such as ocean acidification and coral bleaching, which is caused by unusually high seawater temperatures. Coral skeletal climatology methods have also been used to study Porites boulders cast ashore by historical tsunamis; such studies have high social value from the perspective of regional disaster prevention. Nevertheless, aspects of coral skeletal climatology still need clarification, including the basic mechanism by which seawater temperature is recorded in coral skeletons, and further research on biomineralization will improve predictions of the future responses of marine calcifying organisms to ocean acidification.