How do corals record past climate and ocean conditions?

A colony of stony coral is made up of thousands of colorful little animals called polyps. Each polyp, which is a clone of all the others, builds a hard cup-shaped scaffold of calcium carbonate. It absorbs the calcium it needs from the surrounding seawater.

“It starts as a one story house," said Terry Quinn, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences. "The polyp lives in it for a year, vacates it and then starts building a second story on top.” Slowly, layer by layer, a hard “coral head” forms beneath. All the living coral is on the outer surface.

As the seasons change, sea temperatures rise and fall, as does the amount of sunlight filtering through the water. The layers of a coral head laid down in winter have a different density than those formed in summer. Over time, a coral head develops growth bands similar to those in the trunk of a tree. These appear as light and dark bands in x-ray images.

One colony of coral can grow for several hundred years. By carefully combining records from several coral colonies, Quinn and others reconstruct ocean conditions at time scales ranging from seasons to multiple centuries.  These "climate windows" provide valuable information on how the tropical climate system operated in the most recent past, but also in the geologic past. That’s especially useful information for scientists who build computer models to forecast future climate.