Cold Deadly For Coral

I guess there is a reason why coral grows in the tropics.

SUMMIT COUNTY — Amid all the concern over the impacts of rising sea temperatures to coral reefs, University of Georgia researchers have found that cold water is just as bad.
An extended cold snap in Florida in January and February 2010 killed nearly all the coral in a 200- to 300-year-old reef that had survived other extreme events, including the 1998 El Niño bleaching that damaged coral reefs across widespread regions of the world’s oceans.

During the 2010 cold snap, water temperatures at inshore reefs in the upper Florida Keys dropped below 54 degrees and remained below 64 for two weeks. The University of Georgia team had planned to sample corals at Admiral Reef, an inshore reef off Key Largo. When they arrived, they discovered that the reef, once abundant in hard and soft corals, was essentially dead.

http://summitcountyvoice.com/

About Tony Heller

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13 Responses to Cold Deadly For Coral

  1. Latitude says:

    What they tried to do is come up with a new angle on something that has been know forever.
    They are trying to tie it into corals starving to death. Which is total BS. Corals bleach and lose their zoox for months at a time and don’t starve to death.
    UGA is not known for being the brightest bulbs in the box in marine research, actually they are the laughing stock………..

    They’ve been milking Admiral reef for years, they lost their cash cow….
    …if it was such an important reef, why was a school given permits to collect corals there and kill them?

  2. Tony Duncan says:

    This is crazy,

    corals LOVE the cold. I went diving in the Falklands where the water temp couldn’t have been much more than 5-7°C and THAT was in the summer. I doubt they all die in the winter and then massively recolonize the whole island chain in the summer. But maybe they wear heavy coats.

  3. DirkH says:

    There are corals off the shores of Norway.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_coral

  4. Grumpy Grampy ;) says:

    Is it possible that there are many varieties of coral adapted to different climate regions? 8)
    Just because corals have survived through a variety conditions throughout history should provide some clue as to their hardiness. They repopulated the Bikini Atoll and survive in the Polar regions as well. Chicken Little has been working overtime to make coral a poster child for a nonexistent problem.

    • Latitude says:

      “coral” is one of the most mis-used words…..
      But yes, there are “corals” in all of the oceans.
      These guys are talking about tropical reef building corals – scleractinia

  5. dp says:

    Habitable zones exist all over nature and are exploited by living things. Life that adapts immutably to a narrow subset of all that is possible in nature is going to be at risk when change comes, and change will come. And the adaptable will move in as always. There is nothing particularly sacrosanct about corals or even the world as we know it today.

    By coincidence, our planet is within such a zone and to which life has adapted. For now.
    http://astro.unl.edu/naap/habitablezones/animations/stellarHabitableZone.html

  6. higley7 says:

    We all have to understand that, although corals have survived for millions of years and through many ice ages, we have over-ridden all laws of nature with a minuscule amount of CO2 and EVERYTHING on the planet is now about as delicate as a robin’s egg and about to die. We have to submit to Draconian socialism, return to Little House on the Prairie, and let there be a totalitarian one-world government that would make killing a squirrel punishable with execution even though it ran out into the road and it was impossible to stop. The crime would be driving a car that was heavy enough to kill a rodent—how uncaring to do so.

    Of course, the corals will be just fine.

    • Tony Duncan says:

      Higly,

      Ah, it has been awhile since someone so clearly stated what is underlying most of these comments.
      Americans don’t understand because they have never experienced the evils of socialism. I have first hand, and the devastation was heartrending. the mindnumbing drudgery of slavery to the state just sucked the soul out of people. I am of course referring to Denmark. that country that has had the environmental fanaticism foisted on it. As a result of course the Danish economy has tanked, and productivity plummeted and now there are tens of thousands of danes in rags begging at the borders of conservative Germany, unable to cross and doomed to starvation and freezing as winter approaches. Too bad there aren’t more squirrels there

  7. The Great barrier Rief tells the same story, see “B” in this Graph:
    http://hidethedecline.eu/media/corals%20barrier%20reef/nyc9.jpg

    Taken from
    http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/corals-and-the-great-barrier-reef-43.php
    – A Coral gate…

    K.R. Frank Lansner

  8. gator69 says:

    “Americans don’t understand because they have never experienced the evils of socialism.”

    Yes we have, thanks. It has been creeping into our government for the past 100 years, and is sucking the life out of our economy and degrading our moral fiber. The more socialist we become, the weaker we become, weak like Danes who submit.

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