My first encounter with a coral reef came in a predictable place, Hawaii, during a predictable activity, snorkeling, while on a predictably wonderful vacation 10 years ago. The experience left me with pleasant memories of colorful sea life and a four-inch gash on my ankle that got infected and required a shot.
I later learned that the calciferous material that composes the coral, which also makes it rigid and sharp, had hitched a ride in my wound, leading to the infection and temporarily making me a host to one of the oldest organisms on earth. This knowledge didn’t blunt the pain in my leg but was an interesting fun fact when conversation lulled.
Modern humans have been around for 50,000 years, give or take. In that time, and especially in the last 200 years, we’ve killed off many species that outdated us on the planet. The oldest coral reefs are 50 million years old. And now we’re killing them, too.
Climate change is a probable culprit. There is strong evidence that warm sea temperatures contribute to coral “bleaching” and death, and the world’s oceans are heating up. In some places, a temperature increase of 1 degree Fahrenheit is associated with vast die-offs of the coral reefs.
So much in nature relies on an intricate choreography of elements, none more so than coral reefs. Breathtakingly diverse, they are the rainforests of the oceans, providing food and habitat for 25 percent of all sea creatures.
Thankfully, we have researchers like Steve Palumbi out there in their wetsuits trying to save them. As you can read in Paul Rogers’s story, Palumbi is attempting to understand corals that can survive extreme ocean temperatures to see whether their qualities could be exploited to protect reefs in other places. Might it be possible to replicate “supercorals”?
Or, we could try harder not to kill them in the first place. That option would suit climate scientists like Stephen Schneider, who lately have been diverted from saving the Earth by needing to fend off criticism about whether there is anything to worry about, planet-wise. Schneider defends both the science and the scientists in an interview.
A different kind of science is going on in the lab of Mark Fuller, MS ’78, whose company has engineered some of the world’s most extraordinary water sculpture installations, such as the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas. His creations are powered by precision instruments that can make water dance, bend, swirl and shoot straight up in the air 500 feet, so high that the FAA must be notified lest some low-flying plane run into a jet stream it hadn’t planned on. I am not kidding—it’s right there in the story. Squirt guns have come a long way.
I like magazines that inform, provoke and astonish. Is this issue one of those? Dive in and see.
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